TikTok is once again getting a last-minute reprieve.
President Trump on Tuesday said he’ll likely extend the deadline for China-based ByteDance to sell off the short-form video app before it’s set to go dark on Thursday, according to Reuters.
Trump also told reporters on Air Force One that he believes a deal to sell TikTok will eventually materialize and that Chinese President Xi Jinping will ultimately sign off on it.
This will be the third time Trump has extended the TikTok sales deadline. The app briefly went offline in January just before Trump took office, before he pushed the date to April as negotiations around a sale continued to drag on.
He signed a second executive order extending the deadline again in April, but that expires Thursday.
Trump initially called for a ban on TikTok during his first term in office but changed his stance during the 2024 election, saying that it serves as a bulwark against Meta’s (META) social media dominance. Trump has a contentious history with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The chief executive suspended Trump from his platforms following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump later threatened to jail Zuckerberg.
Congress initially passed and former President Joe Biden signed the law banning TikTok in 2024. The legislation calls for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest itself of the social network. If it doesn’t, US cloud providers and app stores are required to stop hosting the service or face steep fines.
The Trump administration, however, has assured cloud and app store companies that they will not face fines while the deadline is extended.
