President Donald Trump on Friday gave the Chinese company ByteDance 90 days to divest itself of any assets used to support the popular TikTok app in the United States. 

Trump's executive order said there is credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.

Trump last week ordered sweeping but vague bans on dealings with the Chinese owners of TikTok and the messaging app WeChat, saying they are a threat to US national security, foreign policy and the economy.

It remains unclear what the TikTok orders mean for the app's 100 million US users, many of them teenagers or young adults who use it to post and watch short-form videos.

Trump on Friday also ordered ByteDance to divest itself of "any data obtained or derived" from TikTok users in the U.S.

Microsoft is in talks to buy parts of TikTok.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended Trump's earlier TikTok and WeChat orders Thursday, telling reporters he was exercising his emergency authority under a 1977 law enabling the president to regulate international commerce to address unusual threats.

The administration is committed to protecting the American people from all cyber threats and these apps collect significant amounts of private data on users, said McEnany, adding that the Chinese government can access and use such data.

TikTok said it spent nearly a year trying to engage in good faith with the US government to address these concerns.

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, the company's statement said.

Source: RSS

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A report in AP states that Twitter has added a warning to one of President Donald Trump’s tweets about protests in Minneapolis, saying it violated the platform’s rules about “glorifying violence.”

Trump, a prolific Twitter user, has been at war with the company since earlier this week when it for the first time applied fact checks to two of his tweets. Those were about mail-in ballots. 

The third tweet to be flagged came amid days of violent protests over the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man who pleaded for air as a white police officer kneeled on his neck.

“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” Trump tweeted about the protesters. “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

Twitter did not remove the tweet, saying it had determined it might be in the public interest to have it remain accessible. It does that only for tweets by elected and government officials. But the tweet was hidden so that a user looking at Trump’s timeline would have to click on the warning to see the original tweet. 

The earlier tweets that Twitter flagged were not hidden but did come with an option to “get the facts about mail-in ballots,” a link that led to fact checks and news stories by media organizations. Those tweets called mail-in ballots “fraudulent” and predicted that “mailboxes will be robbed,” among other things.

Twitter’s decision to flag Trump’s tweets came as the president continued to use the platform to push a debunked conspiracy theory accusing MSNBC host and former congressman Joe Scarborough of killing a staffer in his Florida congressional office in 2001. Medical officials determined the staffer had an undiagnosed heart condition, passed out and hit her head as she fell. Scarborough, who was in Washington, not Florida, at the time, has urged the president to stop his baseless attacks. The staffer’s husband also recently demanded that Twitter remove the tweets. The company issued a statement expressing its regret to the husband but so far has taken no other action.

On Thursday, Trump targeted Twitter and other social media companies by signing an executive order challenging the laws that generally protect them from liability for material users post on their platforms.

The order directs executive branch agencies to ask independent rule-making agencies including the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to study whether they can place new regulations on the companies, though experts express doubts much can be done without an act of Congress.

The president and fellow conservatives have claimed for years that Silicon Valley tech companies are biased against them. But there is no evidence for this, and while the executives and many employees of Twitter, Facebook, and Google may lean liberal, the companies have stressed they have no business interest in favouring one political party over the other.

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Twitter's moves to label or hide comments from President Donald Trump have escalated a feud between the social network and the White House, but there could be more to come.

The messaging platform has a range of "enforcement" options for dealing with content in violation of its policies, each of which carries its own potential risks and costs.

Twitter has shown a newfound willingness to enforce its policies," said Daniel Kreiss, a University of North Carolina professor specializing in politics and social media.

"If you're a private company you have a right to regulate content, and it behooves those companies to enforce these policies in a fair and transparent and publicly justifiable way. I think Twitter will do this in a consistent way."

While Twitter could have acted before on Trump's tweets, "I think there has been a gradual shift in thinking at Twitter inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, and its thinking about misinformation that is harmful," said Tiffany Li, a fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project who specializes in social media.

Twitter, which this week added fact-check labels to two Trump tweets and a violation notice on another, can go further under its enforcement guidelines.

One option would be to "downrank" or limit the visibility of a tweet, or to remove it.

But Twitter's policies also include a "public interest" exception which would require leaving a tweet online but with the possibility of blocking "engagements" such as retweets and likes.

Kreiss said that because of Trump's importance as a public figure, "I don't think you'll see a takedown" of his tweets but "you might see actions preventing these things from being amplified."

Twitter's guidelines note that "world leaders are not above our policies entirely" and that the platform reserves the right to remove tweets that promote terrorism, violence or self-harm, or includes private information about another person.

- Most drastic steps -

Twitter's policies say the company may suspend or delete an account for repeated violations.

Some of Trump's critics have called for him to be "de-platformed" for his conduct, but such a move could create a political firestorm by acting against a leader with 80 million followers.

"They're not going to want to put themselves out on a limb," said Steven Livingston, director of the George Washington University Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics.

At the same time, Livingston said, Twitter may be making a calculation that it can withstand the pressure as Trump moves further to the extreme.

"The smart people at Twitter are going to want to test the waters to determine if are they putting themselves at political risk by standing up to Trump," he said.

Twitter has already triggered the wrath of Trump, who two days after tweets of his on mail-in voting were tagged as misleading, signed an executive order which could lead to tighter oversight of social media platforms. There are doubts about the order's legality, however.

The San Francisco company carefully weighed its decision this week before labeling Trump's tweets for the first time, according to the news platform OneZero's account of deliberations.

"The company needed to do what's right, and we knew from a comms perspective that all hell would break loose," spokesman Brandon Borrman told OneZero.

Twitter drew an intense backlash not only from the president but from "the internet mob" which directed anger at a specific company executive, according to Li.

"This is troublesome because while Twitter as a company is a relatively strong entity, an individual is more vulnerable," she said.

The dramatic clash between Trump and Twitter may have consequences for both, but both sides may also end up benefitting, according to Kreiss.

"I don't think Trump is going to leave Twitter because this is how he uses it to communicate," Kreiss said.

The conflict "sets up a foil for him and helps him mobilize his base," the researcher said.

"Ironically this is good for Twitter too because it now makes it the center of fundamental debate going into the 2020 election, and it will increase use of the platform."

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