TikTok’s woes have subsided with Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat. Although the company is still under scrutiny with the Biden government’s new executive order, analysts say the dramatic ups and downs for the company will decrease significantly.
Updated
June 9, 2021, 7:03 p.m. ET
James Lewis, a senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Biden government had not shown any relaxation of the government’s strong stance on China. But the new contract sets out much more precise criteria for weighing up the risks posed by TikTok and other foreign opponent companies like China.
“They are going in the same direction as the Trump administration, but in some ways tougher, more orderly and well implemented,” said Lewis. He added that Mr Biden’s order was stronger than the Trump-era directive because “it is coherent and not random”.
Under the new system outlined in Mr. Biden’s order, Commerce Minister Gina Raimondo would be empowered to “use a criteria-based decision-making framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis” to examine software applications loudly deployed by a “foreign” including China a memo circulated by Commerce Department officials and received by the New York Times.
“The Biden government is committed to promoting an open, interoperable, reliable and secure Internet,” the memo reads. “Certain countries,” including China, “do not share these democratic values”.
On Wednesday, administrative officials refused to go into details on TikTok’s future availability to American users or say whether the U.S. government would attempt to force ByteDance, which owns the app, to transfer American user data to a U.S.-based company . Amid a series of successful legal challenges by ByteDance, a deal to transfer the data to Oracle failed shortly after Mr. Biden took office this year.
Government officials said a review of TikTok by the United States’ Foreign Investment Committee, the body that reviews the national security impact of foreign investment in US companies, is ongoing and is being separated from the order.