Presidential candidate Donald Trump worries about banning TikTok ahead of next week’s House vote to give TikTok owner ByteDance about six months to sell the popular short video app. expressed.
The former Republican president, who is seeking a return to the White House, wrote late Thursday on social media site Truth Social, “If you eliminate TikTok, Facebook…will double their business.” He added that he didn’t want it to be “better.”
The campaign did not immediately comment on whether President Trump has a position on the bill. Facebook’s parent company Mehta declined to comment.
The Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday approved a bill to crack down on TikTok, which has about 170 million users in the United States, by a 50-0 vote.
Mike Pence, who served as vice president in the Trump administration, supported the House bill regarding TikTok. “China is poisoning the minds of American children. Enough is enough,” he wrote on social media site X (formerly known as Twitter).
The bill would give ByteDance 165 days to sell TikTok. Otherwise, app stores run by Apple, Google, and others will not be able to legally offer TikTok or provide their web hosting services to applications managed by ByteDance.
In 2020, President Trump sought to ban TikTok and Chinese-owned WeChat, but was blocked by a court.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who previously blocked attempts to expedite the TikTok ban, responded to President Trump’s statement saying the former president helped address concerns about TikTok users in the United States. Through a $1.5 billion corporate project.
“So why are House Republicans supporting Biden (Joe) Biden and still trying to ban TikTok?” “You’ll be acting like a doctrinaire…why not defend the First Amendment?”
In an executive order in August 2020, President Trump said TikTok’s data collection poses a threat that “gives the Chinese Communist Party access to the personal and proprietary information of Americans, and potentially allows China to collect information on federal employees and contractors.” “It allows them to track their location and create dossiers with their personal information for blackmail purposes.” and engage in corporate espionage. ”
TikTok has maintained that it has not and will not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government, but the House bill would amount to a ban and would depend on whether China approves the sale or not within six months. He claims that it is unclear whether there is a possibility that it will be sold.
“This bill has a predetermined outcome: a total ban on TikTok in the United States,” the company said after the vote. “The government is trying to strip 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free expression.”
The app is popular, and it could be difficult to get the bill approved by both chambers in an election year. Last month, President Biden’s re-election campaign joined TikTok.
The Trump campaign is not participating in TikTok.
