Donald Trump has signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the US for another 90 days to give his administration more time to broker a deal to bring the social media platform under American ownership.
It is the third time the president has extended the deadline. The first one was through an executive order on January 20, his first day in office, after the platform went dark briefly when a national ban — approved by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court — took effect.
The second was in April when White House officials believed they were nearing a deal to spin off TikTok into a new company with US ownership that fell apart after China backed out after Mr Trump’s tariff announcement.
It is not clear how many times he can — or will — keep extending the ban as the government continues to try to negotiate a deal for TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance. While there is no clear legal basis for the extensions, so far there have been no legal challenges to fight them.
Mr Trump has gained more than 15 million followers on TikTok since he joined last year, and he has credited the trendsetting platform with helping him gain traction among young voters. He said in January that he has a “warm spot for TikTok”.
As the extensions continue, it appears less likely that TikTok will be banned in the US any time soon. The decision to keep the site alive through an executive order has received some scrutiny, but it has not faced a legal challenge in court, unlike many of Mr Trump’s other executive orders.
Jeremy Goldman, analyst at Emarketer, called TikTok’s US situation “deadline purgatory”.
The whole thing “is starting to feel less like a ticking clock and more like a looped ringtone. This political Groundhog Day is starting to resemble the debt ceiling drama: a recurring threat with no real resolution”.
For now, TikTok continues to function for its 170 million users in the US, and tech giants Apple, Google and Oracle were persuaded to continue to support the app, on the promise that Mr Trump’s Justice Department would not use the law to seek potentially steep fines against them.
Americans are even more closely divided on what to do about TikTok than they were two years ago.
A recent Pew Research Centre survey found that about a third of Americans supported a ban, down from 50% in March 2023. Roughly a third said they would oppose a ban, and a similar percentage said they were not sure.
Among those who supported a ban, about eight in 10 cited concerns over users’ data security being at risk as a major factor in their decision, according to the report.
Democratic senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the Trump administration is again “flouting the law and ignoring its own national security findings about the risks” posed by a China-controlled TikTok.
“An executive order can’t sidestep the law, but that’s exactly what the president is trying to do,” he added.
