As pressure mounts on TikTok following recent congressional legislation, former President Donald Trump has gone on the record in support of the app.
In a post on Truth Social, a right-wing social media site, Trump wrote: “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People.”
For Trump, this is definitely a change of tune. In August 2020, he told reporters that he was planning to the app, and even issued an executive order to do just that in the days following. This order, which gave ByteDance 45 days to sell the app or face a ban in the US, but this order was later blocked by numerous federal judges. This means that Trump’s proposed ban never happened, as the executive order wasn’t legally allowed to stand.
What’s going on with TikTok?
On Thursday March 7, the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously voted to advance legislation which would force ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to divest ownership of the app. The legislation stipulates that it should be done within 165 days.
The reason for this is because ByteDance is a Chinese company, which has led to fear among Americans over their user data security. This fear was so palpable that federal staff and state employees in 34 states are prohibited from having the social media app on Government/state devices.
In a statement responding to the bill on Tuesday March 5, a TikTok spokesperson said: “This bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it. This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs.”
Picture generated by Ideogram
