Trump claimed a ban would help Facebook and « Zuckerschmuck, » a reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Donald Trump appeared to come out in defense of TikTok, the social media platform facing a potential ban by Congress, in a flurry of posts late Thursday on his social media platform Truth Social. The platform, it should be noted, experienced a widespread outage as the former president attempted to live-tweet President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech.
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump wrote on Thursday night.
It’s unclear why Trump called Facebook an “enemy of the people,” a phrase that he usually saves for mainstream media outlets not named Fox News. And it doesn’t appear Trump has ever used the nickname “Zuckerschmuck” for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg before, which, according to a simple Google search, looks like the name of a real online store centered around diabetes.
Trump’s opposition to a TikTok ban would be a reversal of policy for the former president, who signed an executive order in the summer of 2020 that would’ve forced TikTok’s parent company in China, ByteDance, to completely divest of the social media site or face a ban on U.S. soil.
Trump’s executive order, which was held up in federal court before being reversed when Biden took office in 2021, called TikTok’s existence a “national emergency” for the U.
