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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday raised concerns about efforts to ban Chinese-owned social media app TikTok within the U.S., saying it would only serve to empower Meta‘s Facebook platform.
“Without TikTok, you’ll be able to make Facebook larger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” Trump, who was formerly U.S. president between 2017 and 2021, said in an interview Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Acknowledging his concerns around national security and data privacy over TikTok, Trump said, “there’s numerous good and there is numerous bad” with the platform.
“There are numerous people on TikTok that find it irresistible. There are numerous young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it,” Trump said.
CNBC has reached out to Meta for comment.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese web giant ByteDance, has exploded in popularity over the previous few years, becoming a world sensation with its short videos.
It has also led regulators to fear that the software’s Chinese ownership would mean that it could share private user data on the request of the Beijing government.
ByteDance, like other Chinese corporations, would be forced to reveal such information if asked to accomplish that, experts say. China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017 requires organizations and residents to “support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work.”
In 2020, the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to have TikTok faraway from app stores within the U.S. on account of these concerns. Trump subsequently ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok inside 90 days. This effort, which at one point saw Microsoft put a bid in for TikTok’s U.S. business, also never got here to fruition.
Ongoing concerns
Now, U.S. lawmakers are once more stepping up efforts to tackle concerns surrounding TikTok, with separate pieces of laws proposing either a divestiture of TikTok by ByteDance, or a full ban. Incumbent President Joe Biden, who has expressed national security concerns over TikTok, has also said he would sign a bill to ban the app, if Congress passes it.
Trump has recently softened his tone, saying he fears a TikTok ban would only serve to make Facebook more powerful.
In Monday’s interview, Trump said that he feels TikTok stays a national security risk, given its Chinese ownership — but he also deflected attention to Facebook, noting that the platform has similar issues concerning privacy and security.
“If China wants anything from [TikTo], they’ll give it, in order that’s a national security risk [that] goes up,” Trump acknowledged. “But once I have a look at it, I’m not trying to make Facebook double the scale. And if you happen to ban TikTok, Facebook and others — but mostly Facebook — might be an enormous beneficiary, and I believe Facebook has been very busy.”
“I believe Facebook has been very bad for our country, especially with regards to elections,” Trump added.