United States has put a new deadline on TikTok: it will "go dark" on September 17 unless China agrees to the creation of a new company, owned by the US, that will give them full control over the popular app. It was confirmed by Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary for the Trump administration, in an interview with CNBC: "You can't have Chinese control and have something on 100 million American phones" (via Variety)
The riff between US and TikTok, operated by Chinese company ByteDance, dates back from Trump's first administration and it was carried by Joe Biden, who signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) in April 2024. United States has always deemed TikTok "a national security risk", fearing that the app, installed on millions of phones in the US, is controlled by the Chinese government or that it shares information about the US users to the adversary nation, something that ByteDance CEO Shou Zi Chew said was "emphatically untrue" in 2023.
Due to the 270 days deadline imposed by Biden's law, TikTok stopped working in the US on January 19, 2025, but Donald Trump, coincidentally in his first days of his second administration, quickly restored it, offering China an extension of the deadline... followed by another extension, and then another 90-day extension.
As Trump himself admitted, "I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok", because of those who said that the app helped drive support for him among young voters. However, time's up, and if China doesn't agree to the restructure of TikTok's ownership in the US (which would give ByteDance a minority stake, but would be owned and controlled by a still unspecified American buyer), the app will stop working again.