(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump said he would take a look at whether to stave off a looming ban of TikTok Inc., reversing the hard-line stance he took against the Chinese-owned video sharing app when he was president in 2020.
“We’ll take a look at TikTok. You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” Trump said Monday at press conference at Mar-a-Lago, attributing Republican gains with young voters to the social media platform. “TikTok had an impact, so we’re taking a look at it.”
Trump’s evolution on TikTok follows a presidential campaign that relied heavily on the app, which is popular with teenagers and young adults, to post viral videos mocking his opponents, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. TikTok is particularly popular with young audiences that Trump viewed as a key voting bloc.
Four years ago, Trump touted the dangers of China-based TikTok parent ByteDance’s ownership of the influential social media app when he signed an order that gave it an ultimatum: Sell the app or face a ban in the US.
That ban got held up in court and was eventually rescinded by Biden. But last year, the president signed a bipartisan bill requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19, 2025 — the day before Trump takes office — or face a ban.
“What we want to see is a divestment, not a ban. We’ve been very clear about that,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier this month, adding that the administration’s intent was to prevent China “from being able to exploit data gathered on many Americans.”
She declined to say whether Biden would attempt to enforce the divestiture before he leaves office.
Legal Action
A federal appeals court recently upheld that law. But ByteDance is seeking a temporary stay to appeal to the Supreme Court. That would effectively put the decision squarely on Trump’s desk.
The law does not allow the president to waive the requirement. But it does give him some discretion in defining what constitutes a divestiture. The president could determine, for example, that TikTok’s US operations are sufficiently isolated from the Chinese company to ensure data privacy.
Trump reversed his position on TikTok last year, seeing it as a better alternative to competing services from Meta Inc., including Facebook and Instagram reels. He’s called Facebook “the enemy of the people” after it banned him for instigating the attack on the US Capitol before Biden’s inauguration in 2021.
Trump backed up his newfound support of TikTok by using it aggressively in his presidential campaign, pushing memes mocking his opponents. Last week, on the eve of the court decision, Trump posted numbers showing that two short-form videos — of him working in a McDonald’s restaurant and boarding a garbage truck — resulted in five times more engagement on TikTok than they did on Instagram’s video platform.
--With assistance from Josh Wingrove.
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