Donald Trump told journalists on board the presidential plane Air Force One on Friday July 31 that he intended to ban Tik Tok, the popular social network for young people. And the President of the United States intends to act on Saturday. The latter should sign an official order on Saturday to force the Chinese parent company to separate from this very popular American application, in the name of the protection of national security, wrote the Wall Street Journal and the Bloomberg agency.
Other American media, including the New York Times and the Fox News television channel, say for their part that the computer giant Microsoft is considering buying TikTok, which could be worth tens of billions of dollars.
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Intense negotiations
The move would mark a peak in Washington's national security concerns, as officials worry about TikTok's handling of users' private data.
It would also be a major setback for ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok and which has become one of the few Chinese conglomerates with a global dimension thanks to the commercial success of the application.
Donald Trump's announcement follows intense negotiations during the day between the White House, ByteDance and possible buyers for TikTok, including Microsoft.
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Reuters has learned from a source familiar with the matter that the talks failed to reach an agreement for the Chinese company to sell its activities to the United States. Discussions are expected to continue in the coming days.
Expectations from ByteDance, which values TikTok at more than $ 50 billion and insists on remaining in the app's capital, complicated the talks, another source said.
A legal ban?
"We are banning them in the United States," Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One of TikTok. "I will sign the document tomorrow".
We do not know, for the moment, the legal means on which the American president intends to rely to prohibit the application, and how such a ban would be implemented.
Very popular with teenagers, TikTok allows you to create short videos with a lot of special effects. It has nearly 80 million monthly active users in the United States.
ByteDance, Microsoft and the US Department of the Treasury - which chairs the government panel that reviewed TikTok's statutes - declined requests for comment.
"If we don't comment on rumors or speculation, we are confident in TikTok's long-term success," the video platform said in a statement.
With Reuters and AFP
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