President-elect Donald Trump is rethinking his opposition to TikTok with less than a month before it faces an outright ban in the U.S. Trump’s comments come after his electoral victory in November, which saw significant gains with young voters.
“I’m going to have to start thinking about TikTok,” Trump said at a conservative conference in Phoenix over the weekend of Dec. 21. “I think we’re going to have to, we’re going to have to start thinking because 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 they looked at it, I said, maybe we got to keep this sucker around a little while.”
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The Senate passed a law in April that would force the short-form video app’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest TikTok due to national security concerns. ByteDance has made efforts to have that law overturned, and the Supreme Court will hear its challenge next month. But if it doesn’t get a favorable ruling, and they aren’t able to sell off the app, it will be banned in the U.S. as of Jan. 19.
Trump took on TikTok during his first tenure in the White House. He ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok in August 2020.
“With respect to TikTok, I want to put it in the broader context,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in July 2020. “We have been engaged in a constant evaluation about ensuring that we protect the privacy of American citizens and their information as it transits, so this doesn’t relate to any one particular business or company but rather to American national security.”
“We are now evaluating each instance where we believe that U.S. citizens’ data that they have on their phones or in their system or in their health care records — we want to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t have a way to easily access that,” he added.
Since Trump was elected in November, he met with TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Dec. 16. Following that meeting, the President-elect said the app holds a “warm spot” in his heart.
If TikTok doesn’t win its legal challenge, there is still a $20 billion bid sitting on the table from a group led by former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt.
But recently, TikTok has had to deal with government intervention outside of the United States.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama announced Saturday, Dec. 21, the government will officially shut down the app in the country for the entirety of 2025. The move comes after the stabbing death of a teenager, which was the culmination of a social media feud at the end of a school day.
“The problem today is not our children, the problem today is us, the problem today is our society, the problem today is TikTok and all the others that are taking our children hostage,” Rama said of Albania’s TikTok ban.
