TikTok will contribute about $50,000 to Donald Trump’s inaugural party, effectively becoming one of its main sponsors, according to Politico.
Ironically, the party is scheduled for January 19 — which is the official day for the TikTok ban in the USA, which now seems not so likely. Previously, TikTok’s CEO also announced that he would attend the inauguration on January 20 along with other tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others.
The inaugural party has been named the Power 30 Awards and will take place in downtown Washington. TikTok has provided one of the largest sponsorship contributions, ranging from $10,000 to $50,000.
It should be noted that a bill for a complete ban on TikTok was passed by the US House of Representatives in March 2024, supported by the Senate in April, and signed by then-President Joe Biden. According to it, the TikTok ban was to take effect on January 19, with the possibility of a 90-day delay in case of the sale of the social network (there were rumors that TikTok might be purchased by Elon Musk, but they were quickly debunked).
The reason for the network’s ban lies in the potential threat to national security. The Biden administration believed that the Chinese government could force TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to hand over data about American users.
Trump, who supported the social network’s ban during his first term, has now stated that upon taking office, he will allocate time to “politically resolve” the issue and try to “save” the app to maintain “competition” with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
“TikTok itself is a fantastic platform,” said future Trump’s national security advisor Mike Waltz on Wednesday. “We are going to find a way to keep it, but protect people’s data”.
Meta itself has recently refused its previous fact-checking system and canceled internal diversity programs (DEI) due to “a change in the political landscape”. The company has also brought in Republican Joel Kaplan as the chief global affairs specialist and UFC president (and a main ally of Trump) Dana White to its board, while Zuckerberg himself promised to donate $1 million to the future US president’s inauguration.
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