Washington: As he promised, US President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive action that delays enforcement of the TikTok ban for 75 days.
Trump’s order directs his Attorney General to not levy fines against app stores and service providers that continue helping TikTok stay up.
Trump will also order his administration to “issue a letter to each provider stating that there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct that occurred”.
Experts and some Republican lawmakers have said the measures could be legally dubious.
Signing the order on his first day was a theatrical snub to Republican China hawks who have maintained the app must be sold over concerns that TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance poses a threat to national security.
Earlier on Monday, TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration, seated next to Tulsi Gabbard, who is nominated to serve as director of national intelligence. The company also sponsored a Washington party to celebrate the inauguration.
The executive order capped off a tumultuous weekend. The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the sell-or ban law. Then TikTok pre-emptively shut down on Saturday, despite not being required to under the ban. It restored service to US customers a day later after Trump promised he would pass a executive order to save it.
Trump had vowed to intervene to save TikTok, and over the weekend proposed in a post on Truth Social a “joint venture” in which “the US gets a 50 per cent stake”.
On Monday, Trump reiterated his idea for partial government ownership of TikTok, saying: “If I do the deal for the United States, then I think we should get half.”
The action directs the US Justice Department not to enforce the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which passed with broad bipartisan support in Congress and was signed in April by former President Joe Biden.
The law required that starting January 19, TikTok be banned in the US unless it sells to a buyer from America or one of its allies.
The law gives the President broad discretion on how to enforce the ban.
Trump’s promise in a Truth Social post that he would sign an executive action on Monday so that the law will not be enforced served as a sufficient enough pledge that TikTok, which took itself offline for more than 12 hours Saturday night into Sunday, went back online Sunday noon.
But TikTok’s ultimate fate in America remains in doubt. It’s unclear that TikTok’s China-based owner, ByteDance, would want to sell to a buyer, even if it were a deal brokered by Trump.
From the Oval Office, Trump told reporters on Monday that he changed his mind on TikTok because he “got to use it”.
“And remember, TikTok is largely about kids, young kids. If China is going to get information about young kids out of it. To be honest, I think we have bigger problems than that,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
He also told reporters the action that he signed on TikTok gave him the right to either “sell it or close it”.
“I have the right to either sell it or close it, and we’ll make that determination,” Trump added.
(IANS)
