Former US president Donald Trump stated on Monday that he opposed banning TikTok, as the future of the widely used video-sharing app becomes entangled in the US election campaign.
In a major reversal, former US President Donald Trump said on Monday that he was against a ban on TikTok, as the fate of the popular video-sharing app was dragged into the US election campaign.
Years of on-and-off attempts to ban the Chinese-owned app have resurged in the United States with the introduction of a bill in Congress that could see the app forced to cut ties with its Chinese owner, Bytedance.
The US House of Representatives could vote this week on the bill with furious lobbying on both sides, making it hard to predict the outcome, and the stance of Trump could prove key for Republicans.
Trump’s turnaround came as a surprise since he was a proponent of stripping TikTok away from Bytedance when he was president, before he was stopped by a US court.
He feared, as many still do, that the site was a national security threat with tens of millions of young people entertained by TikTok algorithms that are potentially subject to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party, a charge the company strenuously denies.
President Joe Biden has given his support to the bill while also turning to Tiktok to address younger voters in video clips as part of his outreach to win a second term.
The White House, leading the way for many western governments, banned the use of TikTok on government-issued smartphones last year.
But the White House had stopped short of pursuing an all-out ban, with worry in Washington that the move would infuriate influencers and the app’s 170 million US users, mainly young people who will be key to Biden’s re-election.
Trump said he opposed a ban on TikTok mainly because it would benefit Facebook owner Meta and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, whom he believes supports Democrats.
Meta was caught by surprise by the massive success of TikTok, and its Instagram platform has since rolled out its Reels copycat to try to compete (YouTube did much the same with its Shorts feature).
The former US leader denied accusations that he changed his tune because a major investor in Bytedance, hedge funder Jeff Yass, is donating to his campaign.
According to Politico, his former senior aide, Kellyanne Conway, is lobbying against the bill in Congress, working for a political group funded by Yass.
The app raised alarm last week when a push notification, titled “Stop a TikTok shutdown,” asked users to contact their political representatives to fight the bill, sparking a deluge of users’ phone calls to Washington.
with AFP
