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TikTok revival: Trump 2.0 is singing a different tune, giving ByteDance hope in US
When Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th US president on January 20, several tech tycoons were present – from Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos to Meta Platforms’ Mark Zuckerberg – but the unlikeliest among them was TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi.
The executive was standing next to Tulsi Gabbard, the president’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, a day after Chew briefly shut down the app in the country amid a showdown with the government over national security concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
On December 16, a month before a US bill seeking to force Beijing-based ByteDance to divest its flagship app took effect, Chew, a Harvard-educated Singaporean, held a private meeting with Trump. In a demonstration of Trump’s popularity on TikTok, the executive showed the next US president the numbers for content related to him compared with those of Taylor Swift, according to a source briefed on the meeting.
“Trump was extremely delighted,” the person said.
Delight is a marked change from how Trump felt about the short video app five years ago, when he tried to force a sale through executive action, highlighting how a drastic political shift in Washington has given ByteDance a new chance to maintain operations of its biggest product in its most important overseas market. Beijing, too, has signalled a potential willingness to cooperate under the right conditions.
TikTok faces a greater challenge than it did in 2020 in the form of a law signed by former president Joe Biden last year that requires ByteDance to sell the app’s US operations or be banned from US app stores and other hosting providers. Biden withdrew Trump’s executive order on the app in 2021 because it was perceived to be on weak legal footing, while the newer law has already withstood a challenge at the Supreme Court.
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