The election of Donald Trump as the new President of the United States is, ironically, a lifeline to the TikTok phenomenon, pending a looming ban at the federal level.
It is a plot twist for the beleaguered social media company owned by China. During his final term, it was actually the president-elect who had been making all the calls to ban TikTok, which only trailed off because he didn't win his first attempt at reelection in 2020. But during his 2024 campaign, Trump went another way. He posted on his social media platform Truth Social: "FOR ALL OF THOSE THAT WANT TO SAVE TIK TOK IN AMERICA, VOTE TRUMP!

In April, President Biden approved a bill that will allow ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, nine months to sell the platform. If ByteDance is unable to close a sale — something that is expected to happen — it will be prohibited from January 19, 2025, a day before Trump's inauguration. However, ByteDance is entitled to a 90-day extension, which would hand over the ball to Trump. Trump, in his argument for the ban of TikTok in 2020, mirrored the bipartisan leaning of the legislators who spearheaded the legislation passed. He expressed fears over the CCP's potential access to the data of Americans while there had yet to be a public instance of the CCP accessing American users' data on TikTok though it has been proof that ByteDance accessed users of TikTok.

Now, it seems the president-elect has more concern over how a TikTok ban would line up the pocketbook of Mark Zuckerberg's Meta.

"Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people," Trump told CNBC in March.

He also wrote this on Truth Social, adding that he does not want a TikTok ban to grow Meta's business, as he considers Facebook "a true enemy of the people."

Another reason for Trump's apparent about-face on TikTok is his connection to Jeff Yass, a billionaire GOP donor and co-founder of the trading firm Susquehanna International Group. Yass and his wife, Janine, contributed more than $96 million to right-leaning PACs in this election cycle—and Yass also just so happens to own 7% of ByteDance.

This, in turn, also benefits TikTok, but campaign promises from politicians are rarely fulfilled either.