Former President Donald Trump has long warned of TikTok's ties to China, but he favors a sale rather than an outright ban in the U.S.
"I will say I don't want Facebook to get bigger, because I think Facebook is an equal threat — and that includes with China, because if China wants to know anything about what Facebook knows, they're going to give them the information," Trump told Newsmax's "Greg Kelly Reports" in an exclusive sit-down at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday afternoon.
House Democrats have sent a TikTok bill to the Senate after overwhelmingly passing it, forcing the ByteDance company to be sold off to a U.S. bidder to decouple from China.
Trump long sought during his administration to press China on seven unfair trade practices — one of the biggest being forced technology transfer, which permits the Chinese Communist Party access to private data and information from tech companies like ByteDance/TikTok.
But then COVID-19 hit, President Joe Biden took the White House, and Trump built Truth Social after being banned from other social media.
Now Trump is not calling for TikTok's ban; and he is not discrediting the bill passed by the Republican-led House, even if it might be doomed in the Democrat-led Senate. "I didn't say anything other than you have to look at Facebook. Facebook is the enemy of the people," Trump told host Greg Kelly.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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