Photo Credit: Brendan Carr by Gage Skidmore / CC by 2.0
Trump’s FCC nominee wants to focus on a TikTok ban, despite TikTok hoping a Trump presidency will reverse their impending US ban.
As a potential TikTok ban looms over an impending political shift in the US, the short-form video sharing app has been pleased that a Trump presidency might put a stop to the ban — which currently hinges on the app finding a new US-based owner by January 19.
Though Trump initially was in favor of a TikTok ban, he has since considered that such action might spell good things for Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, with whom the president-elect holds a grudge for their having suspended his accounts with them in the past. This elicited a sigh of relief from TikTok, thinking they might be spared from having to make some serious changes to remain stateside.
But Trump’s pick to lead the FCC, Brendan Carr, has indicated his support for banning TikTok, telling NPR in 2022, “I think either a total ban or some sort of action like that that’s going to completely sever the corporate links back into Beijing.”
Meanwhile, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s attorney general pick, who would therefore head the department that would enforce a ban, has previously voted against a ban while he was a member of the House of Representatives — but he has since signaled support for such a move.
“Banning TikTok is the right idea,” he wrote on the former Twitter. “But this legislation was overly broad, rushed, and unavailable for amendment or revision. This is no way to run a railroad (or the internet).”
TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance have sued the US government over the potential ban, calling it unconstitutional and in violation of the First Amendment. The company has also pushed back against assertions that the app is a national security risk.
“Congress itself has offered nothing to suggest that the TikTok platform poses the types of risks to data security or the spread of foreign propaganda that could conceivably justify the act,” said TikTok.
Should Trump decide to stop the ban during his presidency, he would have several methods to achieve that: pushing Congress to repeal the law banning the app, refusing to enforce the ban altogether, or helping TikTok find a US buyer to comply with the law and making a ban moot. But whether he and his appointees will decide to “save” TikTok in the United States remains to be seen.
