Former President Donald Trump defended his flip-flop on the query of banning TikTok Tuesday by lumping the favored China-linked platform with Google and different controversial tech giants.
Throughout a question-and-answer session on the Financial Membership of Chicago, Trump, 78, was requested “why do you now not see TikTok as a safety menace” after he vowed over the summer season to “by no means” shut down the short-form video host.
“I believe it’s a menace,” the forty fifth president and 2024 Republican nominee acknowledged to Bloomberg Information Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait.
“Frankly, I believe every thing’s a menace. There’s nothing that’s not a menace, however typically you need to combat by these threats,” he added. “Identical to Google. I’m not a fan of Google. They deal with me badly. However should you — are you going to destroy the corporate by doing that? Should you try this, are you going to destroy the corporate?”
Throughout his presidency, Trump signed an govt order outlawing transactions between TikTok father or mother firm ByteDance and US residents on nationwide safety grounds.
He has since come out towards laws Congress handed in April to power ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok inside 9 months.
“To me, it was a flip of a coin,” The previous president mirrored Tuesday. “You already know, you’ve some actual First Modification issues. You’ve gotten a variety of issues with it.”
GOP megadonor Jeff Yass is speculated to have privately tried to alter Trump’s thoughts and get him to oppose a TikTok ban.
Most Republicans in each chambers of Congress had backed the April laws, citing considerations about ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese language Communist Occasion (CCP).
TikTok has a trove of searching historical past, biometric identifiers, location knowledge, and different details about tens of millions of US customers.
There have been fears that the CCP may entry that knowledge and that the US adversary is leveraging the platform for propaganda.
Trump beforehand conveyed fears that Meta, his least favourite platform, may get extra market share if TikTok was barred within the US.
The forty fifth president joined TikTok again in June and had sought to court docket youthful voters peeved by the divestment invoice.
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