On Sunday, US President Donald Trump said that his administration is in talks with about four buyers for the sale of TikTok’s US business, as proposed a month earlier. This comes after the owner of TikTok, Bytedance, was deemed a risk to national security. Now, the social media platform has been given a deadline of April 5th to either sell its US business to an American entity or face a nationwide ban.
Although the administration didn’t name the companies explicitly, it did mention that a “lot of people want it” and “all options are good”. This is no surprise, though as evident by a report by Bloomberg, which states that the US is TikTok’s most important and perhaps the biggest market and that last year, the social media platform was worth around $50 billion in the states. Many businessmen, including Elon Musk, were interested in buying TikTok.
During the last Biden Administration, Joe Biden signed a bipartisan law which recognised TikTok as a threat to the national security of the United States of American and required the social media platform to either sell its US business to an American or non-Chinese entity or face a nationwide ban.
After this, Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, filed a lawsuit against the government of America, saying that the concerns for national security were blown out of proportion. But the court favoured the stand taken by the Biden Administration. However, when Trump arrived at the office, he gave TikTok a chance to save face by finding a buyer in the US and keeping its platform from shutting down.
