Former President Donald Trump recently opened up against banning TikTok on Thursday via Mediaite. He went on to argued that Facebook was the “true enemy of the people” and that such a TikTok ban would strengthen Facebook’s business.
During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Trump warned, “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” in reference to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better,” he concluded. “They are a true Enemy of the People!”
The House of Representatives are set to vote on a bill that would force Chinese TikTok developer ByteDance to separate from the popular app in the United States or face a nationwide ban.
On Thursday, Trump’s remarks was apparently a huge deviation from his stance in 2020 when the former president himself moved to ban the app in the U.S.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told a group of reporters in July 2020.
It has been days later that Trump signed an executive order pressuring ByteDance to sell the app to an American company or face a ban.
“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories,” claimed Trump in the executive order:
This 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.
TikTok also reportedly censors content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive, such as content concerning protests in Hong Kong and China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.
“These risks are real,” he concluded. “The United States must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security.”
After Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, the executive order was overturned by the Biden administration. Mark Zuckerberg had visited the White House multiple times during Trump’s presidency, but their relationship soured after Trump was banned from Facebook and Instagram following the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021.
“He used to come to the White House to kiss my ass,” Trump told Fox News following the ban. “And I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ I have the head of Facebook coming with his lovely wife. And they come, and they’d have dinner with me in the White House. And then you see what they do about me and about Republicans, and it’s just sort of crazy. But that’s the way the world works.”
