Presidential candidate Donald Trump raised concerns about banning TikTok ahead of a vote next week by the U.S. House of Representatives that would give TikTok owner ByteDance about six months to divest the popular short video app.
The former Republican president said: “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook … will double their business,” and added he does not want Facebook “doing better.”
Trump, who is seeking a return to the White House, made the comments in a social media post on Truth Social late on Thursday.
The Trump campaign did not immediately comment on whether he has a position on the legislation. Facebook parent Meta Platforms declined to comment.
The Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday approved legislation on a 50-0 vote to crack down on TikTok, which has about 170 million U.S. users.
Mike Pence, who served as vice president under Trump, endorsed the proposed House legislation on TikTok. “China is poisoning the minds of American children. Enough is enough,” he wrote on social media site X, formerly known as Twitter.
The bill would give ByteDance 165 days to divest TikTok; if it did not, app stores operated by Apple, Alphabet’s Google and others could not legally offer TikTok or provide Web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.
In 2020, Trump sought to ban TikTok and Chinese-owned WeChat but was blocked by the courts.
Republican Senator Rand Paul, who previously blocked attempts to fast-track a TikTok ban, responded to Trump’s statement that said the former president helped address concerns about U.S. users of TikTok through a $1.5 billion company project.
“So why is the House GOP siding with (President Joe) Biden and still trying to ban Tik Tok?” Paul wrote on X, using an acronym for Republicans. “If Congress bans TikTok, they will be acting just like the Chinese communists who have also banned TikTok … Why not just defend the first amendment?”
Trump said in an August 2020 executive order that TikTok 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, which says it has not and would not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government, argues the House bill amounts to a ban. It is unclear if China would approve any sale or if TikTok it could be divested in six months.
“This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States,” the company said after the Energy and Commerce Committee vote. “The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.”
The app is popular and getting legislation approved by both the House and Senate in an election year may be difficult. Last month, Biden’s re-election campaign joined TikTok.
Trump’s campaign has not joined TikTok.
