Donald Trump to further postpone TikTok sale deadline

The sale of TikTok, imposed by the US Congress, has been slow to materialize, to the point that Donald Trump will once again postpone the deadline, set for Thursday, due to the lack of a green light from China.

After already postponing the deadline twice by 75 days, the US president will issue a new executive order, this time extending it by 90 days, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Tuesday. The US president "does not want to see TikTok disappear," she said.

The social network remains banned in the United States under a law passed by Congress in 2024, unless its parent company, ByteDance, relinquishes control. According to several American media outlets, a protocol was reached in early April. It provided for the separation of TikTok US from the ByteDance group, with a restructuring of the capital.

The stakes held by non-Chinese investors increased from 60% to 80%, with ByteDance retaining its current 20%. IT group Oracle, which already hosts TikTok US's data on its American servers, was expected to be in charge, along with asset manager Blackstone and entrepreneur Michael Dell, among others.

But the announcement of customs duties imposed by Donald Trump on his trading partners, with a particularly hefty bill for China, at 54% (later raised to 145%), blocked the transaction on the Chinese side.

"We'll probably need China's approval" by mid-September, the new deadline, Donald Trump acknowledged Tuesday. "I think President Xi will eventually give the green light." "TikTok is no longer just a social network," said Shweta Singh, a professor at Britain's Warwick University. "It has become a symbol of the technological rivalry between the United States and China."

Although the two countries agreed in early June on a "general framework" to normalize their trade relations, the TikTok issue remains unresolved. The platform did not respond to AFP's requests for comment.

But far from suffering from this geopolitical crisis, the network still boasts 170 million users in the United States, including 7.5 million business accounts, from large corporations to SMEs. According to the specialist website Appfigures, the social network is the second most downloaded app in the United States, behind ChatGPT on Android phones.

The leniency shown by the billionaire, who reiterated to NBC that he had "a soft spot for TikTok," has significantly diluted the urgency of the situation. On the platform, only a few messages dispassionately mention the date of June 19, their authors convinced that a new deadline is coming.

This is in stark contrast to the beginning of the year, when many influencers were preparing to migrate to other climes, particularly Instagram and YouTube.

In early May, on NBC, Donald Trump still claimed he could integrate the TikTok aspect into broader trade negotiations with China, as a sort of bonus, but the two issues now seem quite separate.

Other candidates for a takeover of the platform had positioned themselves earlier this year, notably entrepreneur Frank McCourt's "Project Liberty" and the generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup Perplexity AI, each wanting to integrate the application into a larger model.

The former did not respond to a request from AFP, while the latter declined to comment. The mystery surrounding TikTok's famous recommendation algorithm, the sophistication of which largely explains the platform's success, remains.

So far, ByteDance has never agreed to the principle of selling this technological gem, as requested by Congress, which is concerned about the use of data by China or an attempt to influence American opinion.

But as Thursday's deadline approached, Congress members, who were very angry a few months ago, now seemed to lose interest in the issue.