With only a few days until a potential TikTok ban scheduled for Sunday, which would impact over 170 million American users of the app, Donald Trump, set to become the next U.S. president on Monday, wants to keep the social media giant up and running.
“TikTok itself is a fantastic platform,” Trump’s incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz told Fox News on Wednesday. “We’re going to find a way to preserve it but protect people’s data.”
“Trump could come out as the hero in all of this,” said Jennifer Grygiel, an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University who studies social media.
However, the president-elect’s view of the social media app has changed since he was last in office. Here’s what to know.
What’s the deal with TikTok?
TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance are attempting to block a law signed by President Joe Biden that will ban the short-form video app beginning Jan. 19, unless it sells its U.S. operation due to national security concerns.
The social media giant has requested the Supreme Court to pause the ban during the legal process, and while the justices heard arguments last week, a decision has yet to be announced. If the ban takes effect on Sunday, Apple and Google will no longer be able to offer TikTok for downloads for new users.
However, the platform could go a step further and shut down the app in the U.S. altogether. TikTok was preparing to do so on Sunday if a federal ban indeed does go into effect, reports say.
TikTok update:TikTok plans to shut down app in US Sunday if ban holds, reports say. Here’s what to know.
Trump’s history with TikTok
Trump has said he has a “warm spot” for TikTok and has vowed to “save” a platform on which his campaign generated “billions of views. In December, he urged the Supreme Court to pause enforcement of the law, saying that voters had given him a mandate to protect their free-speech rights.
The former president described the First Amendment implications as “sweeping and troubling,” as USA TODAY previously reported. He also warned about setting a “dangerous global precedent” for government censorship while acknowledging the “significant and pressing” national security concerns posed by TikTok and ByteDance.
Trump might seem to be a defender of TikTok, based on recent statements, but that has not always been the case.
During his first term as president, he tried to ban the app. In an executive order issued in August 2020, Trump claimed the app was capturing mass amounts of information about Americans and leaving it vulnerable to the Chinese government.
“These risks are real,” the order said. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information − potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
The order was later blocked by a federal judge and dropped by the Biden administration.
Years later, in March 2024, Trump then flipped his position when he came out against the bill to ban the app or force a sale.
“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Trump said in an interview with CNBC at the time. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. There are a lot of users, a lot of good, and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok.”
USA TODAY has reached out to Trump representatives for comment.
Contributing: USA TODAY’s Karissa Waddick, Rebecca Morin, Greta Cross, Jessica Guynn, Erin Mansfield and Reuters
Fernando Cervantes Jr. is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected] and follow him on X @fern_cerv_.
