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Posted: 2024-04-22T20:53:06Z | Updated: 2024-04-22T20:55:28Z

Former President Donald Trump said Monday that young voters should blame President Joe Biden if the U.S. government bans the popular social media app TikTok, even though Trump supported such a ban when he was president.

Congress is on the verge of passing a bill that would require TikToks Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok in less than a year or else see the video-sharing platform banned from U.S. app stores. Biden supports the policy and has said he would sign the bill into law.

Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform . He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party.

Trumps statement slamming Biden for the TikTok ban is a remarkable reversal for the former president, who issued an executive order in August 2020 banning TikTok absent a divestiture by ByteDance essentially the same policy now under consideration.

TikTok said at the time that the forced divestiture and ban would violate First Amendment and due process rights and was just a pretext for Trumps broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric in the run-up to the U.S. election. A federal court quickly blocked the ban before it could take effect. A bill passed by Congress would likely face legal challenges as well.

Trump said in the text of his 2020 order that TikTok represented a national security threat because its data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans personal and proprietary information potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.