TikTok Hawks Tapped for Jobs Contrast With Trump’s Murky Stance
(Bloomberg) -- Some of the loudest US critics of TikTok are set to occupy senior roles in the next Trump administration, providing counterweights to the incoming president’s newfound openness to the popular Chinese-owned app as it faces an American ban.
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Besides nominating Senator Marco Rubio Secretary of State, President-Elect Donald Trump announced he wants China hawk Jacob Helberg to be the under secretary responsible for economic and tech-related issues. Brendan Carr, long an opponent of TikTok, has been tapped to lead the Federal Communications Commission.
All three played a role in convincing lawmakers that Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd.’s ownership of a social media platform with more than 170 million US users would be an unacceptable national security risk, both for the influence of its opaque algorithm and its collection of data on US users.
The appointments set up a potential conflict in the next administration — not least with Trump himself. While Trump supported efforts to ban TikTok in his first term, he’s since softened his stance, using the app during his 2024 campaign to reach younger voters and calling it a necessary counterweight to “enemy of the people” Facebook.
The animosity toward Facebook may dissolve now that its owner Meta Platforms Inc. has donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, part of Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s push to improve the relationship.
Rubio and Helberg at the State Department would unlikely “try to thaw the tech Cold War that has emerged” in recent years, according to Anupam Chander, a Georgetown Law professor who specializes in technology. Even if Trump were to try to strike a deal with China beyond just TikTok, it could be viewed skeptically by the people he has chosen to be his top diplomats.
“He’s the ultimate decision maker, but then he has to get them to reverse their positions publicly,” Chander said. “That’s going to be a little bit of a challenge.”
Spokespeople for Carr, Rubio and Helberg declined to comment.
As a senator, Rubio sponsored a bill in 2021 to ban TikTok on government devices. The following year he introduced a measure to more broadly restrict the app, which helped lay the groundwork for the bipartisan bill signed in April by President Joe Biden. That law will make it illegal for any internet provider or app store to host TikTok in the US unless ByteDance sells the unit by Jan. 19.
Their task of pushing TikTok off Americans’ phones got easier on Friday, when an appeals court declined to pause the ban. Trump still hasn’t commented on that ruling or said what he’ll do about it.
Helberg, appointed two years ago to a congressional commission on US-China economic and trade relations, has fashioned himself into a liaison between venture capital-funded defense startups and lawmakers working on defense policy.
Helberg has been warning about TikTok’s data gathering and algorithmic influence over users since at least 2021, when he published a book on tech and geopolitics.
TikTok is now on track to be banned in the US the day before Trump takes office.
With a recent court case dismissing TikTok’s legal challenges and no concrete deal for a divestiture, there’s not much Trump could do as president to reverse the law, short of instructing his Justice Department to not enforce it or asking lawmakers to repeal or amend it.
While Trump has publicly questioned the need to ban the app — and has celebrated his growing popularity on it — picking Rubio and Helberg for State Department roles may tip that corner of the administration against any action on behalf TikTok.
“I think there’s some signal in those appointments in terms of where the chips are falling,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings fellow who focuses on foreign policy and emerging technologies. “Rubio and Helberg will be more on the side of pressuring China on the TikTok ban.”
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