Trump has publicly supported TikTok many times this year, but campaign rhetoric and actual governance are two different things | Caijing reporter Liu Yiqin editor | Mark On November 6, 2024, the results of the US presidential election were announced, and Trump was re-elected. Acc

Trump has publicly supported TikTok many times this year, but campaign rhetoric and actual governance are two different things

article | "Financial" reporter Liu Yiqin

editor | Mark

On November 6, 2024, the results of the US presidential election were announced, and Trump once again elected.

According to local media reports, TikTok executives believe that the company’s situation will get better after Trump is elected. According to the "Protecting Americans from Applications Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act" signed by Biden in April 2024, TikTok must cut off its association with its parent company ByteDance by January 19, 2025, otherwise TikTok will be banned. The bill received overwhelming support in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

This date is now only two months away, and Trump has publicly stated many times before that he opposes the ban on TikTok and supports TikTok’s competition with the American technology company Meta.

Trump registered a tiktok account on June 1, 2024, and posted a total of 58 posts as of November 6. The latest one was posted at 2:30 pm Eastern Time on November 5. The content was "Everyone, continue to vote, we Will win tonight.”

Trump’s tiktok account has 13.4 million followers.

Tony Sayegh, the head of public affairs of Susquehanna International Group (U.S. Haina International Group), ByteDance’s major shareholder, is a former Trump aide and has close ties with the Trump family. Haina International Group holds about 15% of Byte. According to local media reports, Sayegh regularly communicates with TikTok executives to discuss how to deal with the US government.

However, an American lawyer who has been engaged in international trade for a long time told Caijing that it is now impossible to judge the future direction of tiktok through Trump’s past remarks. Some recent remarks are closely related to the election. How it will be implemented after being elected is another matter. One thing. Trump has just taken office and needs to deal with a lot of work. The new bill in April cannot be repealed in the short term. "The only hope is that Trump may delay the implementation date of the bill so that TikTok can continue to appeal."

According to statista, a third-party data agency, as of April 2024, TikTok has 1.56 billion monthly active users worldwide, including U.S. users The largest number, about 150 million people. TikTok is currently the fifth largest social content platform in the world in terms of number of users. The top four are Facebook (3 billion), YouTube (2.5 billion), Instagram (2 billion) and WhatsApp (2 billion).

After the passage of the "Protecting Americans from Applications Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act", spokespersons for TikTok and ByteDance repeatedly declared that it would be impossible to spin off TikTok. In May 2024, TikTok and ByteDance filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the District of Columbia. They claimed that the bill violated the U.S. Constitution and that the company could not complete asset divestiture within the limited time.

In March and July 2024, Trump twice mentioned in interviews with the media, "Without TikTok, Facebook (meta) will become bigger. I think Facebook is the enemy of the people."

Since tiktok2017 Since its launch in the United States, it has encountered multiple rounds of crises.

In 2017, ByteDance began its global layout and launched tiktok. A few months later, it acquired the American social software company musical.ly for US$1 billion and merged with tiktok. In November 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (cfius) launched a review of the acquisition. In 2020, the committee stated that TikTok had data risks and posed a threat to U.S. national security.

On August 6, 2020, then US President Trump signed an executive order announcing a ban on US companies from trading with TikTok and ByteDance. On August 14, he signed another administrative order requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok of its assets and destroy relevant data and copies.

At that time, TikTok made two preparations. First, it filed an appeal, claiming that Trump violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. At the same time, TikTok is also in contact with many American companies to discuss cooperation matters.

On August 28, 2020, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Commerce of China updated the "Catalogue of China's Export Prohibited and Restricted Technologies" and added "Personalized Information Push Service Technology Based on Attribute Analysis".

A U.S. federal court quickly ruled that Trump’s executive order needed to be put on hold. Since then, Biden came to power and many bans during the Trump era have been revoked, but the crisis of tiktok has not been eliminated.

In June 2021, Biden proposed increasing scrutiny of applications controlled by foreign companies. Since 2022, more than 20 states in the United States have issued administrative bans on TikTok, prohibiting government agency employees from accessing TikTok on government equipment.

The most representative one is that in May 2023, the governor of Montana announced plans to ban TikTok statewide from January 1, 2024. This is the first state government in the United States to announce a ban on TikTok. But soon, TikTok and several TikTok creators filed lawsuits for violating the constitution. In November 2023, the Montana Federal Court requested a suspension of the ban.

In order to solve the trust crisis caused by data, in 2022, TikTok launched the "Texas Plan", costing US$1.5 billion (and then investing US$1 billion annually) to store American user data on Oracle's servers , Oracle is responsible for supervision and review to achieve physical isolation of data.

After 2020, TikTok US companies continued to recruit foreign executives, accelerate the localization of the team, and continued to increase lobbying expenses, but this failed to alleviate the skeptical attitude of the US government.

The U.S. government claims that TikTok poses a threat to national security because the data of TikTok U.S. users may be used to identify intelligence targets or carry out disinformation or propaganda activities, but so far, the U.S. government has not disclosed any evidence.

Despite the crisis, TikTok has maintained normal operations in the US market. According to local media citing tiktok executives, since July 2024, its e-commerce business has sold more than 1 billion US dollars in the US market in a single month. Sales in the US market this year will reach 17.5 billion US dollars, which is 10% in 2023. times.

According to multiple local media reports, in the first half of 2024, ByteDance’s overall revenue growth rate was approximately 35%, while the growth rate of international business exceeded 60%. In international business, TikTok is the main force.

In September 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit for the District of Columbia will hear the tiktok case, and the court is expected to give its ruling in December. If the result goes against TikTok, the company can continue to appeal until January 19, 2025.