He may have led the initial charge to ban TikTok while in office, but former President Donald Trump, in a reversal, is now warning against banning the app, saying it would only empower Facebook, which he called the “enemy of the people.”
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok, but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you’re going to make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media,” Trump said about the controversial app on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Monday morning. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
“I’m not looking to make Facebook double the size,” Trump added. “I think Facebook has been very bad for our country.”
Trump’s comments come as the House prepares to consider legislation that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months, or else the app would be removed from U.S. app stores and websites because of national security concerns about the Chinese government’s interactions with ByteDance. The U.S. is concerned that data collected on millions of users by the app could be handed over to the Chinese government, used to spread propaganda or shift narratives online around sensitive topics.
The former president said that he believes TikTok’s security concerns around national security and data privacy needed to be fixed, but said “there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” including “young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
On Thursday, there was some evidence of this, when TikTok users saw their phones flash Thursday with a push notification urging them to “[s]peak up against a TikTok shutdown.” The alert linked to a page prompting users to enter their zip code, then provided them with a direct link to call their member of Congress. Rep Raja Krishnamoorthy told CBS News that most of the alerts had gone to children, who were “flooding our offices with phone calls.”
Trump has long harbored grievances against Facebook, now known as Meta. In 2017, Trump tweeted “Facebook was always anti-Trump,” and in the wake of his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, Trump took issue with $400 million in donations made by founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to nonprofits supporting local election offices around the country during the pandemic. The donations paid for ballot drop boxes, equipment to process mail-in ballots, recruiting poll workers and voter information campaigns on voting safely during COVID — three initiatives that were opposed by Trump and his allies.
Trump’s false claims on Facebook and Instagram that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him resulted in a two-year account suspension imposed by Facebook parent company Meta. Since he was reinstated in February 2023, Trump and his campaign have been using Meta’s platforms for fundraising.
In 2020, while he was still president, Trump said he intended to ban TikTok, citing “emergency powers’ to target the ByteDance. He signed an executive order banning U.S. companies from transactions with ByteDance, stating that “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.”
Trump told CNBC that he met with Republican megadonor and ByteDance investor Jeff Yass recently, but said the two did not discuss TikTok. Yass owns a 15% stake in ByteDance.
“He never mentioned TikTok,” Trump said.
President Biden told reporters last week that he would sign the legislation if it is passed by Congress.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.
