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Newly elected President Donald Trump once supported a US ban on TikTok.
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Then during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would “save TikTok.”
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His cabinet choices may indicate what position he will ultimately take once in power.
Newly elected President Donald Trump’s view on whether TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company, poses a threat to the United States has shifted 180 degrees.
Will they come full circle?
In April, lawmakers concerned about Chinese influence passed a law that gave ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, a Jan. 19 deadline to sell its social media app to a non-Chinese company or risk a nationwide ban . TikTok appealed, but on Friday a federal court upheld the law, backing the Biden administration’s argument that the service poses a threat to national security.
In 2020, Trump unsuccessfully tried to ban TikTok in the United States, but has since changed his mind. During the 2024 campaign, Trump said young people would “go crazy without it.” Trump’s own TikTok accounts generated millions of views.
Which side Trump ultimately ends up on the issue could have a major impact on ByteDance and TikTok, which say they have more than 170 million users in the United States. Even if the law is upheld after future appeals, Trump could choose not to enforce it during his presidency.
Trump’s closest advisers may have something to say about that. Some of Trump’s top cabinet nominees support a TikTok ban.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida – Trump’s nominee for secretary of state – earlier this year called a ban a “victory for America.” Trump’s pick for chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, also advocated a TikTok ban in Project 2025, a roadmap for the first 180 days of a new Republican presidency that the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published in 2023.
Carr wrote in the plan that TikTok is part of a “campaign for foreign influence in Beijing by controlling the news and information the app relays to millions of Americans.”
Project 2025 calls TikTok “a tool for Chinese espionage” that is “highly addictive” and “particularly popular among teenage girls.”
“The ties between TikTok and the Chinese government are not loose, nor are they coincidental,” the document reads.
John Ratcliffe, the former US director of national intelligence, is Trump’s choice for CIA director. Ratcliffe, also author of Project 2025, told Fox News in 2022 that he thinks TikTok is a “national security threat.”
Govs. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, the president’s pick for Homeland Security secretary, both previously banned the app on state-owned devices.
TikTok has denied accusations that it influences content in the United States or is addictive to children.
A TikTok spokesperson told Business Insider that the TikTok ban law was “conceived and implemented based on inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”
“The Supreme Court has a well-established, historic record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect them to do the same on this important constitutional issue,” the spokesperson said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
