Trump changes his mind on TikTok: “amnesty” to avoid ban from the USA?

The president-elect Donald Trump met the CEO of TikTok in the past few hours in Mar-a-Lago, Florida Shou Zi Chew. The Republican has long since changed his opinion on the ByteDance social network, which in 2020 was the one who proposed a ban from the USA, raising the risk of transferring Americans’ data to the Beijing government.

Several years later Trump has recognized the influence that TikTok also had in the success of its electoral campaign and it is possible that the Casa Biancaafter taking office in January, intervene or put pressure to avoid the ban. The latter would happen in the event that the Chinese giant ByteDance fails to sell the platform by January 19, 2025deadline established in a bipartisan law. However, this scenario is not a given.

Why did Trump change his mind about TikTok?

In the past few hours TikTok he appealed to the Supreme Court to suspend the law and thus gain time for the change in the White House. President Biden continued the Work started by the president elected in 2020, signing the law that now risks banning the social network from the United States.

In recent years, however, Trump has corrected his aim, claiming that a kicked out of TikTok from American territory would facilitate Meta. «Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m for TikTok, because you need competition. If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram. And that means Zuckerberg.” This was Trump’s comment to Bloomberg in a July 2024 interview.

We know that Trump still has some unfinished business with Big Tech who kicked him out of social media after the events of January 6, 2021, with the assault on the Capitol by his supporters. Meanwhile the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberghas decided to show himself open to dialogue and available towards the next presidency by donating 1 million dollars all’inaugural fund.