TikTok has joined the parade of tech companies lavishing money on the incoming Trump administration—though only TikTok faces exile from the American market on Sunday. The video social media platform will sponsor a pre-inauguration party for Donald Trump on Sunday that the company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, will reportedly attend. Pro-Trump influencers who used TikTok to promote him during the recent presidential campaign will be honored.
The event is scheduled on the same day a recently passed law requires TikTok to be spun off from its Chinese owners or shut down U.S. operations—a law upheld by the Supreme Court in a rare unanimous opinion released Friday.
An official with the outgoing Biden administration told the Associated Press that the law will not be enforced in the time between taking effect Sunday and Trump’s inauguration on Monday. This effectively leaves the fate of TikTok in Trump’s hands, and his advisors have indicated that they also will not enforce the legislation.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew
Legislation targeting the operations of a single company is extremely unusual behavior for the government. Yet the bill calling for the company’s sale had bipartisan support in Congress, and President Joe Biden signed it into law on April 23.
The law did not successfully pressure the Chinese government to sever connections to TikTok or parent company ByteDance, and over 170 million Americans continue to use the service millions of times per day. Now, both Democrats and Republicans have apparently changed their positions and are wrangling behind the scenes to give the company behind the wildly popular app a reprieve.
While his new stance aligns with public opinion, Trump’s about-face on TikTok is particularly notable since he was the first at the executive level to pursue government action against the company. In 2020, he issued an executive order that required ByteDance to spin off the video service. In the order, Trump alleged there was “credible evidence” that TikTok “might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”
It’s likely not a coincidence that the order came at the height of Trump’s reelection campaign and that videos mocking him were popular on TikTok. Trump has often pushed for media critical of him to be silenced or shut down. Yet when his campaign finally opened an account on the platform and quickly amassed millions of followers, Trump’s “full flop” on the platform—where he proudly bragged that he was “a big star”—took root.
Following Trump’s successful 2024 campaign, Facebook’s parent company Meta said they would get rid of fact checkers and follow in the footsteps of Elon Musk’s X in allowing disinformation and bigoted content to circulate unchecked. With their sponsorship of the pro-Trump party, TikTok may be signaling they are also moving towards looking the other way in the face of more disinformation.
“Big Tech” joining the Trump coalition—and being welcomed by Republicans—is a reversal from years and years of the right claiming (without evidence) that their voices were being silenced in new media.
Nowadays, they are happy to take Big Tech’s money and bend the laws in their favor—or in TikTok’s case, pretend they don’t exist.
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