President-elect Donald Trump indicated on Sunday that he was in favor of allowing TikTok to continue operating in the United States at least for a while, saying he had received billions of views on the social media platform during his presidential campaign.
Trump’s comments to a crowd of conservative supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, were one of the strongest signals yet that he opposes a possible exit of TikTok from the US market.
The US Senate passed a law in April requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app, citing national security concerns.
TikTok’s owners have sought to have the law overturned, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. But if the court does not rule in favor of ByteDance and no divestment occurs, the app could be effectively banned in the United States on January 19, a day before Trump takes office.
It is unclear how Trump would go about undoing the TikTok divestment order, which passed overwhelmingly in the Senate.
“I think we’re going to have to start thinking because, you know, we went on TikTok and we had a huge response with billions of views, billions and billions of views,” Trump told the crowd at AmericaFest, an annual event. meeting organized by the conservative group Turning Point.
“They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I was looking at it, I said, ‘Maybe we have to keep this sucker in for a while,'” he said.
Trump met with TikTok’s CEO on Monday. Trump said at a news conference the same day that he had a “warm spot” for TikTok thanks to the success of his campaign on the app.
The Justice Department has argued that Chinese control of TikTok poses an ongoing threat to national security, a position supported by most US lawmakers.
TikTok says the Justice Department has misrepresented the social media app’s ties to China, arguing that its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the United States on cloud servers operated by Oracle Corp, while that content moderation decisions affecting American users are made in the United States. USA.
