Two executive orders filed on Thursday night.
The President effectively ban tic toc unless it finds a US buyer within 45 days.
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The order states that any transaction by any person with bytedance or its subsidiaries will be prohibited in 45 days.
This would likely mean that Apple and Google could no longer list the app on their respective stores.
The Tick Tock ban was followed with a similar executive order for WeChat A messaging app owned by Chinese giant Tencent.
As with TikTok, the ban goes into effect in 45 days, but the ban is exclusive to WeChat, an official told the Los Angeles Times.
The executive order detailing the threat posed by TikTok notably bars transactions with ByteDance Not Tik Tok so presumably, this opens up the possibility of Tik Tok continuing to operate under a US company such as Microsoft, which has been in talks about buying some or all of the insanely popular social video app.
So where does this concern come from?.
Well, it stems from the data that Tik Tok and WeChat collect on their US users.
As well as the presumed inability of Chinese companies like ByteDance and Tencent to reject requests from China's ruling Communist Party to access that data.
TikTok responded with a sternly worded statement saying the administration is acting in bad faith.
Quote, for nearly a year, we have sought to engage with the US government in good faith to provide a constructive solution to the concerns that have been expressed.
What we encountered instead was that the administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes.
And tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.
And while concerns of foreign data collection are definitely a valid concern, there doesn't seem to be any general consensus that banning these apps would make Americans data overall more secure.
In addition, there's also the reality that regardless of what the government does some semblance of our connected infrastructure will rely on technology provided by China.
So how does this all shake out?
We just don't know.
But it does seem like if you were looking for a way to give the youth of America are reasons to vote This is maybe how you would do it.
This is a developing story, of course, so please stay with CNET News for the absolute latest.
