US President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday came out in favor of allowing TikTok to continue operating in the country at least for a while, saying he received billions of views on the social media platform during his presidential campaign.
Trump’s comments to a crowd of conservative supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, were one of the strongest signals yet that he opposes a possible exit of TikTok from the US market.
The Senate passed a law in April forcing ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest from the app for national security reasons.
The owners of TikTok requested the annulment of the law and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. However, if he does not rule in favor of ByteDance and does not carry out the divestment, the application could be banned in the United States on January 19, one day before Trump’s inauguration.
It is unclear how Trump would go about undoing the TikTok divestment order, passed overwhelmingly in the Senate.
“I think we’re going to have to start thinking because, you know, we went to TikTok, and we had a huge response with billions of views, billions and billions of views,” Trump told the crowd at AmericaFest, an annual meeting organized by the conservative group Turning Point.
“They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to look at, and as I looked at it, I said, ‘Maybe we have to keep this sucker around for a while,’” he added.
Trump met with the CEO of TikTok on Monday. That same day, he stated in a press conference that he had “warm sympathy” for TikTok thanks to the success of his campaign on the app.
The Justice Department has argued that Chinese control of TikTok poses an ongoing threat to national security, a position supported by most U.S. lawmakers.
With information from Reuters.
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