There are likely to be a lot of “oh, God, what was that all about?!?” moments as we continue to shake off four years of the Donald Trump presidency, but one of the strangest was his saber-rattling against the beloved video sharing app, TikTok.
If you recall, Trump insisted (from Air Force One, no less!) that the social networking service would be verboten. “As far as TikTok is concerned we’re banning them from the United States,” he said to a pool of reporters while zooming through the sky. When asked if he might enact the Emergency Economic Powers Act, he said he would. (Whether or not he had heard of this option before the reporter asked him about it remains unknown.)
The official reason was that Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, were concerned about data leaks to the Chinese owned company. The former Disney exec Kevin Mayer, who was CEO of TikTok at the time, and who ran the company from Los Angeles, said that they were essentially a Chinese company “in name only.”
Trump’s ire toward the app, however, grew stronger after it was used to embarrass him by inflating interest in his June 2020 Tulsa rally.
Nevertheless, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, took the threats seriously, and, after many pushed deadlines and rumors, began to work out a deal in which it would sell off the product to tandem group from Oracle and Walmart.
On Monday, however, the New York Post cited an article in the South China Morning Post that calls the deal effectively dead.
“Trump is gone, and the raison d’être of the deal is gone with him,” an unnamed source said.
When asked about a TikTok ban, President Joe Biden‘s press secretary Jen Pskai said the administration had not taken a “new proactive step” against the company.
TikTok has more than 100 million users in the United States.
So after all that, it would appear that the War Against Funny Videos has ended. Biden’s America is one where it is safe to turn Internet Drama into catchy melodies.
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