Trump rips potential TikTok ban after supporting one as president

Former President Trump signaled his opposition Thursday to legislation that could ban TikTok in the U.S. despite his previous support for banning the social media app.

In a post on Truth Social, the former president claimed a TikTok ban would benefit Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who serves as CEO of its parent company, Meta.

“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump said. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”

Facebook banned Trump in January 2021 in the wake of the Capitol riots, during which hundreds of his supporters attempted to stop the certification of the 2020 election results.

The former president spent months spreading false claims about the election on social media in the lead-up to the insurrection.

Meta reinstated Trump last year.

The legislation Trump criticized, which the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously advanced Thursday, would require TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to divest from the app or face a U.S. ban.

When Trump was in office in 2020, he vowed to ban the video-based social media app from operating in the U.S. and issued an order calling on ByteDance to divest from TikTok’s U.S. operations. However, the order was later blocked in court.

As TikTok has grown in popularity in recent years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have becoming increasingly concerned about the data privacy and national security risks posed by the app.

The “Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” that advanced out of the House committee on Thursday was introduced just two days earlier with more than a dozen bipartisan co-sponsors.

The White House, which has previously supported efforts to give the president the power to ban TikTok, called the legislation a “welcome step” on Wednesday.

“The Administration has worked with Members of Congress from both parties to arrive at a durable legislative solution that would address the threat of technology services operating in the United States in a way that poses risks to Americans’ sensitive data and our broader national security,” a National Security Council spokesperson said in a statement.  

“This bill is an important and welcome step to address that threat,” they added.  

TikTok has been fiercely opposed to the latest effort, calling it “an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it” and urging users to call Congress and oppose the legislation.