As President-elect Donald Trump assembles his White House staff and selects his Cabinet picks, an ideological divide has emerged around a hot-button topic: a ban on TikTok, the social media video app used by around half of the U.S. population.
That divide and a lack of clarity around the administration’s priorities and current positioning on a ban have thrown the fate of TikTok in the U.S. into question.
TikTok is defending itself in federal court over legislation President Joe Biden signed in April that would ban TikTok if it doesn’t sell itself to an American owner by the time Trump takes office.
Further complicating matters for TikTok is the fact that Trump has reversed his public stance on the app as he has announced Cabinet picks with a wide array of views about it.
In 2020, he tried to ban it outright with an executive order that was struck down in the courts. At the time, teen TikTok users claimed to have coordinated lower turnout at one of Trump’s rallies by reserving seats they had no intention to fill. This March, Trump acknowledged that he believes TikTok is a “national security threat” but said a ban would double business for Meta’s Facebook, which he calls the “enemy of the people.”
In June, Trump started his own TikTok account, which now has over 14.6 million followers, the most of any U.S. politician, although he hasn’t posted since Election Day. In a Truth Social post in September, he said he would “save TikTok in America” if he was elected.
If Trump sticks to his word, he could be TikTok’s best chance to avoid a ban. But that’s not a sure thing — most of Trump’s Cabinet and other administration picks who have spoken about the app’s future have strongly encouraged a ban, with a few who have large TikTok and other social media followings opposing one.
Project 2025, the conservative playbook outlining plans for the administration, refers to TikTok as “a tool of Chinese espionage” that should be “outlawed.” In his goals outlined for the Federal Communications Commission in Project 2025, Trump’s choice for FCC chair, Brendan Carr, wrote that one of his main priorities is “reining in” big tech, including banning TikTok.
During his campaign, Trump disavowed Project 2025, a project led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, after it became a central subject of Democratic attacks. However, at least three of his staff picks contributed to or wrote sections of Project 2025, and his transition staffers are pulling from its personnel database, according to a person familiar with the situation.
In the foreword to Project 2025, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts writes that TikTok and other social media platforms “are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.”
Trump’s pick for head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, whose nomination requires Senate confirmation, is another author of Project 2025. He plans to devote even more resources to countering China. “TikTok is a national security threat,” Ratcliffe told Fox Business in 2022, agreeing with the host that the U.S. should “kick out” TikTok.
Most Trump allies who oppose TikTok have cited claims of Chinese government influence over American users, which TikTok denies. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have also referred to TikTok as a national security threat and a way for the Chinese government to get data on Americans, while its proponents have argued that such data is accessible with or without TikTok.
Even as some members of Trump’s incoming administration have advocated banning TikTok, other members have become rising TikTok stars, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, who has over 2 million followers, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has posted only one video (following the popular “day in the life” format in October) and has 36,000 followers. But Leavitt has also spoken out against the platform.
“As a generation Z American, I can tell you all my friends, my colleagues, my former classmates are on TikTok. It is the main source of news for the majority of American youth, and it is truly the bane of our society right now,” Leavitt said last December on Fox Business.
Referring to the Chinese Communist Party, she said: “It is owned by the CCP. They are pushing algorithms that are very damaging to the intellectual curiosity and to the ideology of young Americans today.”
Sebastian Gorka, a Newsmax host and the incoming deputy assistant to the president, described TikTok as a “CCP instrument,” “a way to collect data from Americans, including children, and then exploit it for the purposes of the world’s largest communist regime,” on his show in April 2023.
“People want to ban it, especially on the right,” he added.
Awaiting Senate confirmation to join Trump’s Cabinet are former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, his pick for director of national intelligence, who has over 1 million TikTok followers, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choice for health and human services secretary, who has over 3 million followers. They have both publicly criticized the legislation that would force a sale of TikTok or lead to a U.S. ban.
“Don’t be fooled — the TikTok ban is not about China harvesting your data. That’s a smoke screen,” Kennedy wrote on X in April, adding that he would file a lawsuit challenging the ban on constitutional grounds.
“Congress and the administration don’t understand that TikTok is an entrepreneurial platform for thousands of American young people,” Kennedy went on to write, adding that U.S. data is harvested outside TikTok and that the company “isn’t even majority Chinese-owned.”
“They want to screw them over just so they can pretend to be tough on China,” he wrote.
Gabbard told podcast host Joe Rogan in May that she opposed the legislation to force a sale “on the grounds of free speech and civil liberties,” arguing that it would give the president unilateral power to declare a country a foreign adversary and ban any app the country owned a majority stake in.
“Maybe they’re just going after the ones they can’t actually control and intimidate into doing their work for them,” she said.
Kennedy also spoke to TikTok users about the legislation during a livestream on the platform in June, calling it “perverse,” “twisted” and unconstitutional and characterizing it as private property seizure and a violation of free speech. He said young people should be encouraged to pursue entrepreneurship through monetized content and marketing on TikTok, not have it taken away.
“I have an account on TikTok. It’s important for me to be able to communicate with people on TikTok. There’s a lot of content on TikTok I disagree with, but that’s what democracy is about,” Kennedy said. In the same appearance, he said he disagreed with the government’s decision to ban the Russian propaganda network RT.
TV personality Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to direct the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has 1.1 million TikTok followers, and he uses the platform’s TikTok Shop feature to earn commissions on health and wellness products he advertises from a company he advises.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump has said will work alongside X owner Elon Musk in newly created government efficiency advisory roles, has over 855,000 TikTok followers. Ramaswamy flip-flopped on TikTok when he ran his own presidential campaign in 2023. In between two Iowa campaign stops, Ramaswamy went from calling TikTok “digital fentanyl” to joining it at the advice of Jake Paul, the controversial boxer and YouTube star.
“In retrospect, it was a little bit of an old-fashioned decision to say that there’s an entire mode of communicating with young people that I was going to turn off,” Ramaswamy said, although he has continued to say the app could have a worrying impact on young teens.
Musk, who doesn’t have a public-facing account, opposes a ban. “In my opinion, TikTok should not be banned in the USA, even though such a ban may benefit the X platform,” Musk posted in April. “Doing so would be contrary to freedom of speech and expression. It is not what America stands for.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that TikTok CEO Shou Chew has reached out to Musk since the election, looking for insight into Trump’s administration and tech policy.
Musk and Ramaswamy don’t need to be confirmed by the Senate, because their roles aren’t official government positions, although Trump said they will work to inform the Office of Management and Budget.
Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., voted in support of the bill to force a sale of TikTok and advocated for a ban. In February, after Biden’s campaign joined TikTok, Waltz told Fox News the campaign should be “ashamed.” He suggested the Chinese Communist Party could stage “election interference” on TikTok.
“It is long overdue,” Waltz said about a ban. “We should not allow our greatest adversary to access 150 million Americans and their data.”
“Why is it OK to ban TikTok on all government devices because it’s essentially a spyware tool … but it’s OK to have it on our kids’ phones, monitoring everything they look at?” Waltz asked on Fox Business in July 2023. “We would have never allowed this in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and we shouldn’t be allowing it now.”
Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has been advocating against TikTok since the company first merged with the app Musical.ly in 2019. He co-introduced legislation to ban TikTok from government devices in 2021 and in all of the U.S. in 2022, supported Trump’s executive order to ban TikTok and called the legislation that would force a sale to an American owner “a huge step toward confronting Beijing’s malign influence.”
After Trump was elected, Rubio said he would defer to him on TikTok, although he still had concerns about the “vulnerability it poses.”
“He’s the president, so if that’s what he wants to do, he also has the power to do it,” Rubio said.
In late 2022, Trump’s pick for homeland security secretary, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, and his choice for interior secretary, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, both banned TikTok from state-owned devices.
In an interview with Fox News in March, Noem said TikTok is “owned by the Chinese Community Party. Their No. 1 desire is to destroy America, so that is why we should be alarmed at the amount of influence they have in this country.” She said TikTok was released at the same time as the Covid-19 pandemic was (it was actually released in the U.S. in August 2018) to “influence our youth.”
Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Ore., Trump’s pick for labor secretary, and Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., his choice for ambassador to the United Nations, both voted in favor of the bill that would force a sale to an American owner.
“I have consistently said that Tik Tok is a national security threat,” Stefanik said in a statement in March. “We cannot allow our adversaries to build an arsenal of data on American citizens that can be used to exploit and weaponize them.”
Former Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., Trump’s pick for veterans affairs secretary, told Newsmax in March 2023 that he opposed TikTok’s Chinese ownership but that the legislative path to ban it was a “tough decision,” creating a potential path to government overreach. “We really don’t need the government getting into that, and that’s the problem,” Collins said.
Trump’s choice for surgeon general, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a family and emergency medicine doctor and Fox News medical contributor, has personally advocated for a ban — not just on TikTok but on all social media for children.
“In my opinion, social media should be banned to all teens and young children, because it’s done nothing but harm,” she said on Fox News.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
