President Donald Trump will extend a deadline for the owner of social media platform TikTok to find a U.S. buyer so that it can remain operating in the country, the White House said Tuesday.
Trump plans to sign an executive order this week that will keep the platform, which has about 170 million U.S. users, running despite a bipartisan law banning it over national security concerns.
The 2024 law requires the app’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell it to a non-Chinese buyer or face a nationwide prohibition.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday.
The order will give ByteDance three more months to comply with the law, which was upheld early this year by the Supreme Court.
“This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure,” Leavitt said.
During his first term, Trump banned TikTok by executive order, arguing it was a potential tool of a foreign adversary, China. Courts thwarted that ban.
The law was passed last year and was set to take effect as Trump began his second presidential term.
The video-sharing app briefly went dark in the United States just ahead of Trump’s second inauguration, but service was restored after he signaled he would act.
Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office postponing the TikTok ban for 75 days, giving its owner until April 5 to find a U.S. buyer.
In March, Vice President JD Vance expressed confidence in a deadline-beating deal, saying, “There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement.”
With no buyer apparent in April, the president extended the deadline until Thursday.
Earlier Tuesday, the president said that any divestiture deal would “probably have to get China approval, but I think we’ll get it. I think President Xi will ultimately approve it.”
Trump joined the platform as a user a little over a year ago.
