https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200731/13123445014/tiktok-clusterfuck-trump-to-order-chinese-owner-to-sell-microsoft-to-buy-competition-continues.shtml

There's been a panic over the last few weeks about TikTok, the rapidly growing social network that is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance (by way of history: ByteDance purchased a startup called Musical.ly in 2017, and rebranded it TikTok in 2018, and then it started growing like crazy). A few weeks ago, the Trump administration started suggesting it would ban TikTok, and a story was built up around the idea that TikTok was some sort of national security threat, despite very little evidence to support this. A separate narrative was simply that Trump was annoyed that TikTok kids made Trump look bad in Tulsa by reserving a bunch of tickets to his rally that they never intended to use.

Either way, it was announced today that the Trump administration was likely to order ByteDance to shed TikTok and immediately with that was the news that Microsoft was a likely buyer.