US President-Elect Trump Considers Keeping TikTok Up, Argues It May Be Worthwhile
The US President-elect Donald Trump could keep TikTok running in the country for a little longer. According to Reuters, the US TikTok ban is set to commence in under a month.
TikTok -Trump Meeting
Trump reportedly held a meeting with the TikTok CEO, after which the President-elect said he has a warm spot for the social media app.
“We’re going to have to start thinking because, you know, we did go on TikTok, and we had a great response with billions of views, billions and billions of views. They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I looked at it, I said, ‘Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while,” Trump said.
The President-elect made these comments in front of a conservative supporters in Phoenix, Arizona. These remarks, which indicate his opposition to the social media’s US market exit, are the strongest indication of Trump’s TikTok policy yet,
US TikTok Ban Laws
TikTok has been facing a range of legal challenges in the US in recent years. Towards the end of 2022, the government prohibited the use of the social media app on federal government devices, with a few exceptions. This US government TikTok policy took effect soon after President Joe Biden signed the No TikTok on Government Devices Act.
In April 2024, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the TikTok divestiture-or-ban bill. The lawmaker’s decision was driven by rising fears that China could use the app to surveil Americans or access their data. Outgoing President Joe Biden signed the bill into law in April 2024. The law requires TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the short video streaming app by January 19, 2025, or face a ban on TikTok operations in the US.
ByteDance has filed a lawsuit to strike down this law in court. The US Supreme Court will hear the arguments from the company and the State on January 10, 2025. Should the court rule against ByteDance, and the company fail to divest, TikTok may be banned in the US a day before Trump’s inauguration.
An Uphill Task
It’s still not clear how the President-elect will undo the TikTok divesture-or-ban law considering that it was passed by a wide majority in the US Senate. Besides the divest-or-ban lawsuit, the Chinese social media giant has been sued in Washington DC and 13 other states for failing to protect young people and harming them mentally.
The states alleged that the company intentionally designed an addictive software whose features keep children glued to mobile phone screens for long hours.
The child addiction lawsuits expanded Tiktok’s fight with US regulators and paved the way for additional penalties against the social media company.
TikTok argues that the US Department of Justice misrepresented the short video streaming app’s links to China. The tech giant said its content recommendation technology and user data are stored in cloud servers located in the US and operated by Oracle Corporation. The company said that decisions on content moderation that affect US TikTok users are made in the US.
