TikTok, White House agree to drop Trump-era lawsuit

The Chinese owned social media platform TikTok has reached an agreement with the White House to drop a lawsuit challenging former President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban the video app from app stores in the United States.

In 2020, then-President Trump issued an executive order that aimed to ban the social media app in the United States, arguing that it posed a national security threat because the Chinese government was gathering user data through the platform. "This data threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information – potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information and blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage," the order said.