Trump’s position on TikTok ban? How his views have changed

On January 16, 2025By Littum

With just a few days until a potential TikTok ban is scheduled for Sunday, which would affect over 170 million US users of the app, Donald Trump, who will become the next US president on Monday, wants to keep the social media giant up and running.

“TikTok itself is a great platform,” Trump’s incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz told Fox News on Wednesday. “We will find a way to preserve it but protect people’s data.”

“Trump could come off as the hero in all of this,” said Jennifer Grygiel, an associate professor of communications at Syracuse University who studies social media.

However, the president-elect’s views on the social media app have changed since he was last in office. Here’s what you need to know.

What’s up with TikTok?

TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance are trying to block a law signed by President Joe Biden that would ban the short-form video app from Jan. 19 unless it sells its US operation due to national security concerns.

The social media giant has asked the Supreme Court to put the ban on hold during the legal process, and while judges heard arguments last week, a decision has yet to be announced. If the ban goes into effect on Sunday, Apple and Google will no longer be able to offer TikTok for downloads to new users.

However, the platform could go a step further and shut down the app completely in the US. TikTok was preparing to do so on Sunday if a federal ban does take effect, reports say.

Trump’s history with TikTok

Trump has said he has a “hot spot” for TikTok and has vowed to “save” a platform on which his campaign generated “billions of views. In December, he urged the Supreme Court to halt enforcement of the law, saying, that voters had given him a mandate to protect their free speech.

The former president described the First Amendment implications as “sweeping and troubling,” as USA TODAY previously reported. He also warned of setting a “dangerous global precedent” for government censorship, while acknowledging the “significant and pressing” national security concerns of the likes of TikTok and ByteDance.

Trump may appear to be a defender of TikTok, based on recent statements, but that hasn’t always been the case.

During his first term as president, he tried to ban the app. In one executive order issued in August 2020Trump claimed the app captured mass amounts of information about Americans and left it vulnerable to the Chinese government.

“These risks are real,” the order said. “This data collection threatens to give 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 extortion, and conduct corporate espionage.”

The order came later blocked by a federal judge and the fall of the Biden administration.

Years later, in March 2024, Trump then reversed his stance when he opposed the bill to ban the app or force a sale.

“Honestly, there are a lot of people on TikTok who love it,” Trump said in an interview with CNBC then. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. There are a lot of users, a lot of good ones, and there’s a lot of bad things about TikTok.”

USA TODAY has reached out to Trump representatives for comment.

Contributing: USA TODAY’s Karissa Waddick, Rebecca Morin, Greta Cross, Jessica Guynn, Erin Mansfield and Reuters

Fernando Cervantes Jr. is a trendy news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected] and follow him at X @fern_cerv_.