What does Trump's election mean for the TikTok ban?
As TikTok stares down an impending federal ban, Donald Trump's win in the presidential election could be a lifeline. It's a plot twist for the embattled,
As TikTok stares down an impending federal ban, Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election could be a lifeline.
It’s a plot twist for the embattled, Chinese-owned social media company. During Trump’s last presidency, the president-elect had been the one to initiate the calls to ban TikTok, which only petered out because he didn’t win his first attempt at re-election in 2020. But during his 2024 campaign, Trump took a different approach. He wrote in all-caps on his platform Truth Social, “FOR ALL OF THOSE THAT WANT TO SAVE TIK TOK IN AMERICA, VOTE TRUMP!”
President Biden signed off on a bill in April that gives ByteDance, the Chinese parent company to TikTok, nine months to sell the platform. If ByteDance fails to complete a sale — which is a likely outcome — it will be banned on January 19, 2025, the day before Trump’s inauguration. However, ByteDance has the option of pursuing a 90-day extension, which would put the ball in Trump’s court.
Trump’s reasoning for his support of a TikTok ban in 2020 echoes the current bipartisan sentiment among legislators who pushed for this legislation. At the time, Trump raised concerns about the Chinese Communist Party potentially gaining access to Americans’ data (while there has not been public evidence of the CCP accessing American TikTok users’ data, there has been proof that ByteDance accessed TikTok user data). Now, the president-elect appears more concerned with how a TikTok ban would benefit Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
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