Photo: Alamy
Since 2020, the social media platform TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, have been a hot topic of debate in the United States.
On Sunday during his speech at AmericaFest, hosted by Turning Point USA, President-elect Donald Trump suggested that he could try and save the app, which will be banned on January 19, 2025, unless ByteDance agrees to divest from TikTok.
“We did go on TikTok and we had a great response with billions of views,” Trump remarked.
He said he was shown a chart of his TikTok success and then told the crowd, “And as I looked at it, I said, maybe we got to keep this sucker around for a little while.”
Trump’s TikTok account has 14.7 million followers, most of which came shortly after he joined the platform in June. Millions of young voters use the platform, and Trump has credited young men with his electoral success, according to Axios.
Congress included the ban in a foreign aid package that Biden signed into law earlier this year. However, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over the constitutionality of the forced sale before the ban takes effect.
A D.C. court of appeals previously ruled that the United States government could regulate the platform due to national security concerns.
TikTok’s CEO, Shou Chew, has testified before Congress on numerous occasions. Each time, he claimed that TikTok does not share user data with ByteDance, which is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
According the Chew, the company has taken various steps to convince lawmakers that its data is not shared with the CCP. In 2022, the company moved user data to cloud-storage with Oracle, an American-owned company.
However, many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were not satisfied with the change and continued to push for a total ban. Biden surprisingly favored the measure and swiftly signed the bill into law.
TikTok is already banned on all government devices for national security purposes but remains available in the United States. It is unclear if the app will still be available to Americans while the Supreme Court weighs the law.
