NEW YORK, June 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the United States for another 90 days, allowing his administration more time to negotiate a deal under the "sell-or-ban" law.
Thus, TikTok can continue functioning for its 170 million users in the United States.
This is the third time for Trump to extend the TikTok ban deadline. By Thursday's executive order, the deadline will be further extended to September 17, 2025. Before then, Trump has extended the deadline twice each by 75 days on January 20 and April 4, 2025, respectively.
Trump has amassed more than 15 million followers on TikTok, an app popular among American youth owned by China's ByteDance Ltd., since he joined presidential race in 2024. He said in January that he has a "warm spot for TikTok."
As the extensions continue, it becomes less likely that TikTok will be banned in the United States any time soon, as the executive orders to keep TikTok alive have received some scrutiny but never faced a legal challenge in court, local media said.
In his first term, Trump signed an executive order effectively seeking to ban the app in the country unless ByteDance sold its U.S operations to an American company. The order did not go into effect amid legal challenges.
In April 2024, then-President Joe Biden signed a law giving ByteDance 270 days to sell TikTok, citing national security concerns. Under the law, failure to comply would require app store operators like Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their platforms starting Jan. 19, 2025.
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, about one-third of Americans support a TikTok ban, down from 50 percent in March 2023; roughly one-third oppose a ban; and a similar percentage are not sure.
TikTok, originally known as Douyin in China, was launched in September 2016. It launched its international version, TikTok, later that year, but it wasn't until August 2018 that TikTok merged with the lip-syncing app Musical.ly and became widely available in the United States. ■