Banging on the weekend: US President Donald Trump announced to journalists present in the night of August 1, 2020 that he will enforce a Tik-Tok ban in the USA by decree on Saturday.
“As for Tik-Tok, we ban it from the United States.” With these words, US President Donald Trump sealed the ban from the Tik Tok social video platform in the US on Friday evening in front of US journalists in his Air Force One.
Tik-Tok ban by decree
“I will sign a document tomorrow,” Donald Trump added, also on Friday night. Today – August 1, 2020 – the President of the United States of America wants to enforce a Tik-Tok ban by decree.
According to Donald Trump, the very same Tik-Tok ban will take effect “immediately”. Or to put it another way, the popular social video platform could fly out of the Apple and Google app stores before the end of Saturday.
Fear for national security
Investigations into a possible ban have been underway in the USA since the beginning of July 2020. The reason given for the investigation is that Tik Toks’ Chinese parent company Bytedance passes on personal user data – including that of US-Americans – to the Chinese government.
Ultimately, therefore, the national security of US citizens is at stake. For its part, Tik Tok has always maintained that it will not pass on any data. Whether and to what extent this is true, as with all social networks, must at least be doubted.
Spin-off of Tik Tok’s US business no option
With the decision of Donald Trump, the last hope of Tik Tok and Bytedance is also off the table. So there was still a rumor on Friday before the president’s statement that Bytedance could sell its US business.
Experts had acted as potential sellers the US software company Microsoft. But a little later Donald Trump confirmed his radical approach and rejected a takeover in front of the journalists present.
Who benefits from the Tik-Tok ban in the USA
Whether national security was the decisive and real reason for the Tik-Tok ban in the USA will probably remain unclear forever. What is certain, however, is that two US corporations will benefit greatly from the decision.
After all, Snapchat and Facebook are two direct competitors from the United States. Accordingly, investors reacted positively to Donald Trump’s statements. The share prices of Snapchat (plus 4.97 percent) and Facebook (plus 7.42 percent) shot up on Friday.
The political Tik-Tok ban plays into the cards of both companies. After all, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, considers Tik-Tok to be serious competitors for his own empire.
It was only in the last week of July that it became known that Facebook had apparently spent hundreds of thousands of US dollars to try to steer major creators from Tik Tok to the Facebook subsidiary Instagram. With an official Tik-Tok ban in the USA, the influencers are coming on their own.
Thus Facebook has once again succeeded – albeit unintentionally – in taking a potentially dangerous competitor out of circulation at an early stage. And Donald Trump is certainly pleased that two US companies are now benefiting from his decision.
