United States President-elect Donald Trump (file photo)

TikTokthe Chinese video platform, which is the subject of a US ban, could be offered a lifeline by President-elect Donald Trump, after his election campaign hinted at a possible reprieve. According to a report, Trump’s team has indicated that it plans to “deliver” on these campaign promises, although specific plans remain unclear.
“The American people re-elected President Trump with a large majority, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will keep his promises,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance’s transition team, told the New York Times.
This support will mark a major shift from 2020, when Trump sought to ban TikTok and demand its sale to a U.S.-based company because of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

Ban on TikTok in the United States

A federal law passed in April requires TikTok, which has 170 million users nationwide, to be sold to a non-Chinese company by Jan. 19 — just a day before Trump’s inauguration — or face a ban .
TikTok has challenged the law in court, arguing that a sale is impractical given Chinese government restrictions and that a ban would violate the First Amendment.

What Trump said in the run-up to the US election

In 2020, President Donald Trump announced that he would ban TikTok.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we are banning them from entering the United States,” Trump said. However, he reversed his position in March while admitting that the app posed a threat to national security but that Facebook was “the enemy of the people.”
“I believe that, and we absolutely have to admit that we are protecting the privacy and data rights of Americans,” he said, adding that banning TikTok would lead to the growth of Facebook, which he described as an “enemy of the people”. »
“But as you know, I was at the point where I could have done it if I wanted to. I should have said, you decide, you make that decision, because there are a lot of people talking about it and loving it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who would go crazy without it. There are a lot of users,” he said.
“There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad with TikTok. But what I don’t like is that without TikTok you can make Facebook bigger, and I see Facebook as an enemy of the people, just like a lot of media outlets do,” he told CNBC.
Trump will take the oath of office at the presidential inauguration on January 20, as specified in the 20th Amendment to the Constitution.