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Former US President Donald Trump.
© Lev Radin/Imago
In the USA, efforts to ban the Chinese platform TikTok continue.
Donald Trump sees a different opponent.
Washington, DC – In April 2022, Donald Trump watched a documentary that blamed Mark Zuckerberg's financial expenses for the former president's loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
The film, produced by Citizens United President David Bossie, deepened Trump's animosity toward the meta-boss.
The likely Republican nominee for the 2024 US election is increasingly convinced that Zuckerberg was responsible for the 2020 outcome, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Washington Post on condition of anonymity.
Bossie's film is titled "Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump."
Donald Trump: Especially against Facebook
Trump's growing antipathy toward Zuckerberg helps illuminate the former president's position on the video-sharing app TikTok.
Trump tried to ban TikTok while he was in office before a court blocked the attempt near the end of his presidency.
Lately, however, he has signaled opposition to fast-moving House legislation targeting the app.
Last week, the former president argued that a ban on TikTok would primarily help Zuckerberg and Meta, who also post short videos on various apps.
In an interview on CNBC on Monday, he appeared to reiterate his opposition to a ban.
“I don’t want Facebook, which cheated in the last election, to be better off,” Trump said last week on Truth Social, his social media site.
The former president provided no evidence to support his claim.
“You are a true enemy of the people.”
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On CNBC, Trump said he believes TikTok is a national security threat.
But he added: “If you ban TikTok, Facebook and others, but especially Facebook, will benefit.
And I think Facebook was very dishonest.
I think Facebook has done a lot of harm to our country, especially when it comes to elections.”
Trump understands TikTok users
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump views Chinese ownership of TikTok as a threat to national security but appreciates that millions of people like the app.
“President Trump believes Congress must take action to protect the security and privacy of American users across all social media platforms,” Cheung said.
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To the authors
Josh Dawsey
is a political enterprise and investigations reporter at The Washington Post.
He has worked for the newspaper since 2017 and previously covered the White House.
Previously, he covered the White House for Politico and covered New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal.
Jeff Stein
is a White House business reporter for The Washington Post.
He was a crime reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard and founded the nonprofit local news outlet Ithaca Voice in Upstate New York in 2014.
He was also a reporter for Vox.
As president, Trump issued an executive order in 2020 declaring that TikTok threatened "the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," although he backed away from a ban before the fall election, in part because he viewed the move as unpopular and likely to alienate young voters.
His current about-face is also partly the result of a lobbying campaign tied to a Republican sponsor whose connections extend into Trump's inner circle.
Billionaire Jeff Yass' investment company owns 15 percent of ByteDance, representing about $40 billion of the company's $268 billion valuation.
When asked by CNBC about a recent meeting with Yass, Trump said that the GOP donor "never mentioned TikTok" in his conversation and that Yass' wife instead advocated for school choice reform.
Yass had been a critic of Trump in the past.
Drew Harwell contributed to this report.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on March 13, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation and a shortened version to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.