TikTok Sale Put On Hold After Joe Biden Orders Review Of Donald Trump China Claims – Report

Long-developing plans to engineer the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a group of investors including Oracle and Walmart have been put on hold.

The indefinite delay, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, has been ordered by President Joe Biden’s administration, which is conducting a review of the conclusions about TikTok reached by Donald Trump. The former president, who waged a trade war with China and repeatedly referred to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus,” characterized TikTok, which is owned by China-backed conglomerate ByteDance, as a security threat.

ByteDance has prevailed in multiple initial legal challenges to an executive order issued by Trump, who threatened to shut down TikTok unless it was sold to a U.S.-led concern. Executives from the company have held talks with U.S. officials regarding data collection by TikTok, whose usage has soared in the U.S. over the past couple of years. A central issue is whether the Chinese government will have access to data from U.S. users.

Biden’s plan, according to the Journal report, is to conduct a thorough review of the security aspects of the data collection.

“We plan to develop a comprehensive approach to securing U.S. data that addresses the full range of threats we face,” National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne told the Journal. “This includes the risk posed by Chinese apps and other software that operate in the U.S. In the coming months, we expect to review specific cases in light of a comprehensive understanding of the risks we face.”

One scenario under consideration would see a third-party data clearinghouse set up as an alternative to a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations.

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