Biden halts TikTok's sale to Oracle and Walmart to review the anti-China executive order that Trump used to force deal
- The Biden administration is reviewing his policy on China, including any potential involvement it has with TikTok
- While that happens, the sale of TikTok to Oracle and Walmart has been halted, according to unnamed officials
- It's unclear if Biden plans to revoke the order Trump signed which forces ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, to sell it to a US company
- If he does, it would signal a huge victory for the Chinese company and government
- Trump claimed TikTok - which has 100m American users - was collecting data on American users
- He said he was going to ban it in America unless ByteDance sold it to the US
- TikTok fought back in court and it was supported by three federal judges who blocked Trump's order
- Trump's administration appealed it before he left office and those appeals are still before the court
The Trump-ordered sale of TikTok by its Chinese owners to US companies Oracle and Walmart has been put on hold while President Biden reviews the executive order that strong-armed it.
In what could be a huge gift to Beijing, the new president was reported to have stopped a landmark action by his predecessor Donald Trump who called the app a threat to national security.
Last year, as TikTok erupted in the US amid a spike in social media usage thanks to the pandemic, concerns grew with it that ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns it, was using it to gather intelligence on American consumers.
Trump issued an executive order banning the app in the US unless ByteDance sold it to a US-owned company.
Oracle, which is owned by Trump mega-donor Larry Ellison, then stepped forward to buy it and Walmart joined in later. The Trump administration said it would endorse the deal.
ByteDance fought it and filed court papers contesting the executive order. Three federal judges sided with them but before Trump left office, his administration appealed those decisions and those appeals are still before the court.
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources saying the entire deal had been put on hold while Biden's administration reviews the national security information that went behind it.
The Journal sources did not indicate whether Biden's team plans to reverse the executive order entirely. He may instead impose limits on how to restrict the collection or storage of user data rather than bans or forced sales.
TikTok has more than 8billion users worldwide and 100million are in the US. Last year, Trump signed an executive order banning it in the US unless its Chinese owner divested its US operations to an American company
Trump issued an executive order last August banning TikTok in the US unless it could be sold to a US company. Biden's administration has put the sale of it on ice while they review that order and the national security data that went behind it
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, when asked about the deal, played down the suggestion that Biden had ordered a stop to the deal but she was vague on other details.
'It's not accurate to suggest that there is a new proactive step by the Biden White House.
'We are comprehensively evaluating the risks to US data, including from TikTok.
'If we have news to announce, we will announce it,' she said.
It's unclear if he has ordered Walmart and Oracle to halt negotiations, but now there's a question of whether any sale will actually be necessary.
If Biden rescinds the executive order which banned TikTok and allows ByteDance to continue operating in the US, it will signal a victory for the Chinese and would stiff Walmart and Oracle out of a major opportunity.
Neither Walmart nor Oracle has commented on the Wall Street Journal report and both companies have been quiet on the details of the forced sale for months.
There remain huge questions about whether TikTok was gathering intelligence on US consumers for the Chinese government, as Trump claimed.
The company has always denied it.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (left) who is a Trump mega-donor and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon (right). McMillon was among business leaders invited to the Oval Office on Tuesday to discuss Biden's economic revival plans
Trump's order meant that the Commerce Department had to shut down the app in the US by November 12 unless it was sold to a US company.
TikTok denies that it has ever given user data to the Chinese government. President Xi Jinping is pictured
It came after months of concern from policy makers about its fast-growing popularity and whether the Chinese government was using it to harvest information on Americans.
In October 2019, Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton asked the intelligence community to review the national security risks it posed.
In August 2020, Trump - acting on the suspicion that it did pose a risk - ordered the company to stop operating in the US.
By then, American teenage influencers had started making thousands of dollars per video and the app had grown its US audience to 100million users.
There was uproar among millennials, many of whom proudly claim on the app to have abandoned Facebook-owned Instagram in favor of it.
Trump then told ByteDance it had the option of selling the American branch of TikTok to a US-majority-owned company.
Oracle, which is run by his friend Larry Ellison, emerged as the buyer after a failed bid from Microsoft.
Trump endorsed the Oracle bid. He then said the US government should take a cut of the deal. One of the provisions of the sale was a $5billion education fund.
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