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With the clock tik-tocking down on the ban of Chinese social media platform TikTok, one of the leading bidders for the wildly popular app bluntly called the platform ‘spyware’ and says lawmakers who voted to pass the “divest or ban” bill more than a year ago are ready to push the issue.
In a FOX Business exclusive interview, O’Leary Ventures Chairman Kevin O’Leary – who together with billionaire Frank McCourt Jr. has officially presented a bid to take control of TikTok – said Republican senators’ patience with President Donald Trump’s multiple extensions of the deadline is running thin.
“If you’d asked me two weeks ago was a fourth extension likely, I would have said yes, because it could have been bundled as a story around finishing off (the trade deal) with China, which could take well ‘til way after the midterms. And now? Now, Senators (Tom) Cotton, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, they’re Republicans. They’re just saying the law is the law, and it’s time to pull the plug, because is it spyware? Yes, it is.”
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The TikTok law, officially known as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” was signed into law on April 24th of last year. The law gave TikTok’s Chinese parent Bytedance until January 19th, 2025 to sell its stake in the app to a U.S. entity or face a nationwide ban. Since then, President Trump has pushed the enforcement date three times, the most recent being June 19th.
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In a statement the White House gave a temporary pass to app stores that carry TikTok, saying, the Department of Justice “shall take no action to enforce the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act, including for distributing, maintaining, or updating” the app.
Recently, in a sign the administration might also be losing patience with Bytedance dancing around the deadline, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a CNBC interview that if China refuses to approve a deal for TikTok US’s sale by mid-September, “then TikTok is going to go dark.”
“We’ve made the decision,” said Lutnick. “You can’t have Chinese control and have something on 100 million American phones.”
O’Leary agreed telling FOX Business, “(Commerce Secretary Howard) Lutnick said the right thing because the pressure now from the lawmakers that wrote this law that have gone through these multiple extensions – I think they’ve had enough.”
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The issue has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Last December, then President-elect Trump asked SCOTUS to pause the ban from going into effect until his administration could pursue a political resolution to the problem. But weeks later, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the federal law, ruling the risk to national security posed by TikTok’s ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting free speech.
Bytedance reportedly plans to offer a solution ahead of the September 17th deadline – not to sell the app but, according to The Information, present a new version of it for US users, an idea O’Leary found laughable.
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“There’s not a chance you can let the guys that wrote the spyware write the new spyware. What, are we all idiots? I mean, you think Congress is going to buy that? Zero probability that works. Zero. I would have tried it, and they have. Zero probability that works,” said O’Leary. “That’s like a Trojan horse rolling in. ‘You don’t like that spyware? How about this spyware?’ I mean, that’s crazy.”
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