Former U.S. President Donald Trump announced his opposition to legislation that could ban TikTok in the United States, despite his previous support for banning the app. In a post on "Truth Social," the former president stated: "Banning TikTok would benefit Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who is the CEO of the parent company Meta." Trump added, "If you get rid of TikTok, then Facebook and its head will double their business, and I don't want Facebook, which cheated in the last election, to perform better. They are the real enemy of the people!".
Facebook banned Trump's account in January 2021 following the Capitol riots, where hundreds of his supporters attempted to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. The former president spent months posting allegations about the election on social media in the lead-up to the insurrection, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, reinstated Trump's account last year.
The legislation Trump criticized, which was unanimously advanced by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday, requires the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, based in China, to divest its holdings in the app or face a U.S. ban. When Trump was in office in 2020, he pledged to ban the video-based app from operating in the U.S. and issued an order calling on ByteDance to divest its interests in the app's operations in the United States. However, the order was later blocked in court.
