President Donald Trump on Thursday invoked his emergency economic powers to impose broad sanctions against TikTok, a move that steps up pressure on the Chinese-owned app to sell its U.S. assets to an American company.
In the order, which takes effect in 45 days, any transactions between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and U.S. citizens will be outlawed for national security reasons.
The order likely will mean the viral video service could no longer receive advertising from American companies and the app could be removed from Apple and Google’s app stores.
For the more than 100 million Americans who have downloaded TikTok, experts say the app may no longer be sent software updates, rendering TikTok unmanageable, and eventually nonfunctional, with time.
“When we talk about sanctions against Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats, well, the sanctions are that no American can do business with them,” Stewart Baker, the former general counsel at the National Security Agency, said last month when speculation about the order first began to spread.
Now, that same sanction has been used against TikTok.
In the order, the White House says TikTok captures vast swaths of information from its users, including location data and Internet search history.
TikTok is open about what data it collects, an amount that is on par with what is harvested by apps owned by American tech companies Google, Facebook and Apple.
“While TikTok is being singled out in this executive order, their data collection and sharing practices are fairly standard in the industry,” said University of Notre Dame technology professor Kirsten Martin. “In fact, many fitness apps were banned from use in the military for tracking location data, but we did not ban them from all US citizens.”
