Published January 27, 2025
As one of his very first actions as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order on Inauguration Day promising to extend a lifeline to the embattled Chinese company ByteDance, owner of TikTok. For the next 75 days, he would direct the Department of Justice to hold off on enforcing a law demanding that ByteDance either divest itself of the social media app or have it banned in the United States. The law’s deadline for divestiture was the previous day.
With his legendary skills as a dealmaker (and now with Elon Musk on his team), President Trump seems determined to use the ban as a bargaining chip to bring the Chinese government to the table. And evidence suggests it’s already working. China, which formerly had insisted that divestment was simply impossible, issued a statement on Jan. 20 declaring its fervent belief in the right of companies like ByteDance to decide any questions of corporate acquisition on their own.
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Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.