WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he supports short-video app TikTok despite the looming possibility of a ban if its Chinese parent company ByteDance fails to sell the company’s U.S. assets.
“I support TikTok because TikTok needs competition. If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram,” Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published Tuesday. Trump has previously called TikTok, which is used by 170 million Americans, a threat, but joined the platform last month.
President Trump has criticized Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Instagram for suspending his accounts for two years following the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, and said in a June interview that he would never support banning TikTok.
TikTok declined to comment. President Trump tried to ban TikTok Chinese-owned WeChat The move was blocked by the courts in 2020, but in June 2021, President Joe Biden rescinded a series of Trump-era executive orders that sought to ban WeChat and TikTok.
Trump owns a majority stake in Trump Media and Technology Group, a social media company that runs rival network Truth Social. Trump Media has a market capitalization of $7 billion, the equivalent of two U.S. Starbucks stores, despite having quarterly revenue of about $770,000.
A U.S. appeals court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in September on a lawsuit challenging a new law that gives China-based ByteDance until Jan. 19 to sell TikTok’s U.S. assets or face a ban.
The case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit puts TikTok’s fate in the middle of the final week of the 2024 presidential election.
The legislation, signed by Biden on April 24, requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19 or it will be banned. The White House has said it wants an end to its China-based ownership interests for national security reasons but does not want to ban TikTok. Biden’s campaign joined TikTok in February.
The bill was overwhelmingly passed by Congress in April, just weeks after being introduced, following concerns from US lawmakers that China could use the app to access Americans’ data and spy on them.
