Trump Is Right (For The Wrong Reasons): A TikTok Ban In The US Would Be A Huge Problem

It's potentially forgotten in all the other nonsense that has happened over the past four years, but the initial push to ban TikTok" in the US started right after a bunch of TikTokers reserved fake seats for a rally that Trump's campaign people thought was going to be mobbed by people and ended up being embarrassingly half empty.

Days later, the Trump administration suddenly announced that TikTok was a national security threat and it was going to get banned. Following that, there was a comedy of errors as the administration couldn't figure out how to actually ban it, in part because banning a website is almost certainly unconstitutional. Eventually, a month later, Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok, and it didn't take long for a court to say that Trump can't actually do that, in part because of the lack of any real evidence of a security threat, and in part because of First Amendment concerns.

It later came out that the entire ban TikTok" effort was really part of a big grift to try to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a friend of Donald Trump.

For what it's worth, the same basic thing happened last year when the state of Montana also tried to ban TikTok only to have it tossed out on First Amendment grounds.

But still, as noted, Congress is really, really into banning TikTok this time around, despite the legal setbacks from the last few attempts. And it didn't help much that last week TikTok made a hamfisted attempt to have its users call members of Congress to complain.

So, it took some by surprise when Donald Trump came out and said that he no longer supports a TikTok ban because it would only work to help Facebook.

Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people," Trump, who was formerly U.S. president between 2017 and 2021, said in an interview Monday on CNBC's Squawk Box."

He's 100% correct. And remember, Facebook's parent company Meta spent years quietly running a targeted PR campaign among politicians to demonize TikTok, which was the only company in years that showed that Facebook's supposedly dominant position as the social media king was maybe not quite as dominant as it wanted everyone to believe.

That's quite an about face for Trump who really kicked off the entire concept of banning TikTok. But, he's absolutely correct. Again, TikTok proved that it's possible to build a competitive social network, and the idea that no new entrant could ever succeed in the space was laughable. Knocking TikTok out of the space, or forcing a questionable divestiture to some other giant tech company, would massively help Meta and its Facebook and Instagram properties.

But, of course, there may be other reasons that Trump has turned around on this. As he also correctly noted, there are a lot of young people who love TikTok, and shutting down the app in the US may piss off a lot of younger voters:

There are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it," Trump said.

Indeed. This is another reason why it's weird to see Democrats so supportive of this move. Even as the Biden re-election campaign is now using TikTok as a tool to get out its message and meeting with famous TikTokers, the administration has come out in support of this unconstitutional ban.

Given that, it's entirely possible that Trump's decision here is just straight-up political calculus. The Democrats have been way faster to embrace TikTok than Republicans, and maybe Trump and his handlers saw last week's flood of calls to Congress and recognized that banning TikTok may suppress the youth vote, which is more likely to go to Biden than Trump.

Of course, as many others pointed out, the flip-flop in Trump's position also came soon after he met with billionaire Trump supporter Jeff Yass who owns a huge chunk of ByteDance, though Trump denies that had anything to do with it. Yass, however, is spending considerable effort trying to kill the bill.

That said, whether or not Yass has anything to do with this, Trump's points are actually accurate. Banning or forcing the divestiture of TikTok would be a huge gift to Meta. It could also be a political nightmare for whoever goes through with it.

Still, there is the larger reason that Trump doesn't mention (perhaps because he argued the other way in the past). It's almost certainly unconstitutional. It sets a terrible precedent for supposed US freedom - one that will come with significant blowback as other countries demand that successful US companies divest" from their operations overseas or face similar blocks. I could easily see India or Brazil or other countries demanding a similar sort of remedy and pointing to the US's actions against TikTok as reason to support it.

Again, the TikTok ban is stupid. If you're concerned about data exfiltration, pass a comprehensive privacy law. If you're concerned about manipulation, then better educate the public so that they're not so easily influenced by an app made to share short videos.