President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday that he plans on banning popular social media application TikTok in the US.
According to White House pool reports, Trump said, “I have that authority. I can do it with an executive order or that.”
“As far as TikTok is concerned we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump told the reporters. Trump added that he planned to take action against the popular video-sharing app as soon as Saturday.
Earlier on Friday, Bloomberg reported that Trump was planning on forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the company. The company is based in China, a country Trump has ramped up tensions with amid the coronavirus pandemic.
But Trump indicated to reporters on Friday that he is not in favor of allowing a sale of the company to an American-based company.
The popular social media application has gained popularity among younger Americans in recent months. The application allows users to share short video clips, often accompanied with music.
Users of the application orchestrated a campaign to Trump's first rally during the coronavirus pandemic in June in Tulsa to reserve tickets and not show up, which prompted lower-than-expected attendance numbers.
The Trump administration has complained that the application takes data and is used by the Chinese government.
"All the things that you care that you want to make sure the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t have, we have a responsibility to make sure that the systems that you’re using don’t give them access to that," US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week.
