TikTok’s fate in the US has improved immensely after the election of Donald Trump to a second presidential term, according to industry observers and insiders, as the valuation of the app’s Chinese owner ByteDance swells.
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The future of the embattled short-video platform is “a lot brighter than it was” after Trump’s win, said Cameron Johnson, senior partner at consultancy TidalWave Solutions and an American with over 20 years of business experience in China.
While the new administration may demand certain concessions from TikTok, such as data and management localisation, “they may not outrightly ban TikTok because it helped them too much in the election”, Johnson said.
Saving TikTok may give Trump a point of leverage during bilateral negotiations with the Chinese government, Johnson added.
A year before the US presidential election, TikTok’s leadership pushed for a shift in the platform’s content moderation rules in favour of more conservative views, a move that potentially benefited Trump and his supporters, The Information reported last week.
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