MW Trump just delayed the U.S.'s TikTok ban - again. Will he face a lawsuit?

By Victor Reklaitis

Ninety-day reprieve follows two earlier orders that directed the Justice Department not to enforce a U.S. ban on the app

President Donald Trump threw a lifeline to TikTok in January, and he did it again in April. The Trump White House has just staged a repeat performance. With the clock ticking down on his most recent extension, Trump signed an executive order on Thursday pushing the deadline out a further 90 days.

Trump has kept ordering the Justice Department not to enforce a bipartisan law that was intended to ban TikTok nationwide as of Jan. 19 as long as the video-sharing platform remains controlled by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd. Supporters of the law have argued that the popular app is a threat to national security and have raised data-privacy concerns.

Analysts have said Trump's executive orders, including the one signed Thursday, during the Juneteenth federal holiday, do not appear to be on solid legal ground, and Bloomberg Intelligence's Matt Schettenhelm has argued that there's potential for a lawsuit from TikTok users concerned about their data possibly going to China.

"I continue to think a decent lawsuit could be filed to challenge the nonenforcement," Schettenhelm told MarketWatch in an email on Monday. "That one hasn't been filed yet is likely because there is a concern that a plaintiff couldn't show legal standing - that they couldn't show they are uniquely injured by the nonenforcement of the law.

"If facts were to emerge showing that users' data had been exposed in China after Jan. 19, those standing concerns would ease significantly," he added. "A story like that could also make it politically more difficult to defend the nonenforcement. But for now, we've had no such reports."

Trump told NBC News last month that he's willing to grant a third extension to TikTok, and he indicated that his administration's efforts to get TikTok's parent to sell off the U.S. operations have been caught up in broader trade fights between Washington and Beijing. Early Tuesday, Trump said he "probably" would provide an extension again, and later in the day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president will sign an executive order this week delivering exactly that.

"This extension will last 90 days, which the administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure," Leavitt said in a statement.

Bloomberg Intelligence's Schettenhelm said he expects Trump will continue to "kick the can down the road" until "it's not in his interest to do so anymore." The analyst added: "The law is on the books and at some point, President Trump or his successor (or perhaps the right litigants) will find it in their interest to enforce. That will pose major risk to TikTok and the U.S. companies who make it available."

TikTok was restored to the U.S. app stores run by Apple Inc. $(AAPL)$ and Alphabet Inc.'s $(GOOG)$ $(GOOGL)$ Google unit in February, after the tech giants were assured by the Trump administration that they would not face legal ramifications for enabling downloads.

If TikTok ever were to go away in the U.S., analysts have said that would boost the platform's publicly traded competitors. The video-sharing app's rivals include Meta Platforms Inc.'s $(META)$ Facebook and Instagram, Google's YouTube and Snap Inc.'s (SNAP) Snapchat.

Critiques of nonenforcement, and concerns about Temu

The TikTok issue "feels almost philosophical" at the moment, Schettenhelm told MarketWatch. "If a law is on the books and no one is going to enforce it, does it even exist?"

Another analyst, Robert Kaminski at Capital Alpha Partners, said in a note Sunday that TikTok should have been banned on Jan. 19, and he and his colleagues believe that Trump's Jan. 20 extension for TikTok, which gave the platform 75 days to spin off from ByteDance, "had no basis in the statute."

As Trump's first extension was ending April 5, the president called for another 75-day extension that's now due to end Thursday. If the third extension is for 90 days, as the White House press secretary indicated, that would run until mid-September.

Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, a conservative legal group, criticized Trump in a social-media post for what he described as the president's "ongoing refusal to do his constitutional duty and enforce the 'TikTok ban,' a law passed by Congress, signed by a president and upheld by the Supreme Court."

Meanwhile, another popular platform with ties to China, Temu, drew a lawsuit last week from Nebraska's attorney general, Mike Hilgers. Hilgers, a Republican, said in a statement that he's targeting Temu in part because it could send Nebraskans' personal data to Beijing.

A spokesperson for Hilgers didn't respond to MarketWatch's request for comment on whether the attorney general plans to sue TikTok as well.

Temu has said it categorically denies the Nebraska official's accusations. The online marketplace is operated by PDD Holdings Inc. $(PDD)$, which was founded in China but now has its headquarters in Ireland.

The move against Temu by Nebraska's attorney general comes after his counterpart in Arkansas made a similar move against the app a year ago, touting a "first-of-its-kind state lawsuit." It also comes after the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, published an analysis last fall that said while "much attention has rightly focused on TikTok, Temu represents an equally dangerous threat worth increased government scrutiny" - noting that the shopping app has an "ability to collect large amounts of personal data," as well as "linkages with the Chinese Communist Party."

The Associated Press contributed.

-Victor Reklaitis

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 19, 2025 12:05 ET (16:05 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.