The Commerce Department backed off of a possible ban of Chinese-owned TikTok, citing a federal court order from late October instructing the Trump administration not to move forward with such an action against the video-sharing social media app as a court battle is conducted.
Judge Wendy Beetlestone, an Obama appointee, issued a ruling against the Trump administration in October, saying that “a nationwide injunction is warranted” and that its TikTok ban should not be allowed to go into effect in the United States until she reaches a final judgment in a civil lawsuit brought against President Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross by Douglas Marland, Cosette Rinab, and Alec Chambers, three TikTok users.
“This Order enjoined the Department from enforcing the Identification and the prohibition on transactions identified,” the Commerce Department noted on the Federal Registrar website on Thursday, adding, “The Department is complying with the terms of this Order. Accordingly, this serves as NOTICE that the Secretary’s prohibition of identified transactions pursuant to Executive Order 13942, related to TikTok, HAS BEEN ENJOINED, and WILL NOT GO INTO EFFECT, pending further legal developments.”
TikTok had complained to a U.S. appeals court earlier this week about a “lack of clarity” from the Trump administration about what was happening with the app.
“The spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” Trump said in his August executive order, adding, “TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.”
Trump issued another executive order telling the Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations and empowered the commerce secretary to enact and enforce the orders under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Ross announced rules in September related to TikTok that would prohibit “any provision of internet hosting services enabling the functioning or optimization of the mobile application in the U.S.,” “any provision of content delivery network services enabling the functioning or optimization of the mobile application,” “any provision directly contracted or arranged internet transit or peering services enabling the function or optimization of the mobile application,” and “any utilization of the mobile application’s constituent code, functions, or services in the functioning of software or services developed and/or accessible” in the U.S.
The commerce secretary said at the time that “at the President’s direction, we have taken significant action to combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data.” TikTok had been given until Thursday to work out a deal with U.S. companies that could be approved by Trump and the Treasury Department.
TikTok lamented earlier this week that it had been left in legal limbo by the Trump administration as questions remain about the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States’s review of a proposed deal with U.S.-based Oracle and as a possible ban of the app loomed. The deadline for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is headed by the treasury secretary, to approve TikTok’s continued operations in the U.S. was Thursday, after which a divestment order had been set to go into effect. But that didn’t happen.
A separate D.C.-based federal court had issued a separate injunction in September against the Trump administration’s rules that would have removed TikTok from app stores, which the Justice Department appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in October.
ByteDance and TikTok have repeatedly claimed that they have not and would not turn over TikTok user data to the Chinese government, but national security experts have raised concerns about China’s 2017 national intelligence law, which requires all Chinese companies to assist Chinese intelligence services when asked — and to keep it secret.
More than 100 million people in the U.S. use TikTok.
Numerous U.S. government officials, including John Demers, the assistant attorney general of the National Security Division, have described that a national security threat is posed by TikTok, and the Pentagon, other government agencies, and a host of organizations have banned employees from using the app. TikTok has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court.
