Trump Administration to Ban TikTok App Downloads From Sunday

The Trump administration will block downloads of TikTok from U.S. app stores from Sunday, The New York Times reports. The ban follows Trump’s pledge to “terminate” the platform’s U.S. operations if parent company ByteDance failed to fully divest its U.S. wing. (The software company Oracle announced a successful acquisition bid on Monday.) If no sale is completed before November 12, further prohibitions will effectively blacklist the app from American phones.

Another Chinese-owned company, WeChat, will be comprehensively banned from Sunday. That means preventing “any company from offering internet hosting, content delivery networks, internet transit or peering services to WeChat, or using the app’s code in other software or services in the United States,” the Times reports. Trump claims both companies pose a national security risk, which they deny; TikTok sued the Trump administration at the end of August. 

Check out Pitchfork’s “TikTok Report” column, covering the good, the bad, and the straight-up bizarre songs spreading across the platform via dances and memes.