By Gram Slattery
(Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump indicated on Sunday that he would prefer to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States for at least a short time, saying it received billions of views on the social media platform during his presidential campaign.
Trump's comments to a crowd of conservative supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, were one of the strongest signals yet that he opposes TikTok's potential exit from the US market.
The US Senate passed a law in April requiring TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to pull the app, citing national security concerns.
TikTok's owners sought to overturn the law, and the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. But if the court doesn't rule in ByteDance's favor and the divestment doesn't go through, the app could actually be banned in the US on January 19, one day before Trump takes office.
It is unclear how Trump will proceed with undoing the TikTok divestment order, which passed overwhelmingly in the Senate.
“I think we're going to have to start thinking because, you know, we used TikTok, and we had an amazing response with billions of views, billions and billions of views,” Trump told the crowd at AmericaFest, an annual festival. The rally was organized by the conservative group Turning Point.
“They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was very nice to see, and when I looked at it, I said, 'Maybe we should keep this fool for a while,'” he said.
Trump met with TikTok's CEO on Monday. Trump said in a press conference on the same day that he had a “warm taste” for TikTok thanks to the success of his campaign on the app.
The Justice Department has said Chinese control of TikTok poses an ongoing national security threat, a position supported by most US lawmakers.
TikTok said the Justice Department misinterpreted the social media app's ties to China, arguing that its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the United States on cloud servers operated by TikTok. Oracle Corporation (NYSE:), while content moderation decisions affecting US users are made in the United States.
