Exclusive | 77% of Americans concerned about Chinese ownership of TikTok as Trump admin scrambles to save app
A whopping 77% of Americans say they remain concerned about the Chinese ownership of TikTok – even as the Trump administration scrambles to cut a deal to “save” the popular app, according to a national survey obtained by The Post.President Trump has until April 5 to find a US buyer for TikTok before his executive order delaying enforcement of a federal ban on the app expires.TikTok briefly went offline in January after its Chinese parent ByteDance ignored the Jan.
19 deadline to completely divest.Overall, 63% of Americans support either a complete ban of TikTok or a forced sale of the app to American owners.Just 19% prefer ByteDance to remain in control with increased US oversight, while 15% were fine with no changes to current ownership.“The same people that voted Donald Trump into office do not trust the Chinese Communist Party’s control over TikTok,” Michael Sobolik, an expert on US-China relations and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
“They want no part of it and they don’t want it to continue.”Strikingly, 36% of respondents who said they regularly used TikTok support banning the app, which has 170 million US users.The share of Americans concerned about ByteDance’s control jumped to 83% after pollsters presented them with details about the Chinese Communist Party’s cybersecurity laws, which require companies to comply with intelligence-gathering by Beijing.When asked about their top concerns regarding Chinese ownership of TikTok, 88% of respondents cited the potential spread of misinformation, while 84% pointed to political polarization within the US and 83% cited potential CCP cultural influence within the US.The online survey was conducted by The Vandenberg Coalition, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, and polling firm JL Partners.It polled a nationally representative sample of 1,017 registered voters, with a margin of error of 3.1%.“The survey shows that a forced sale or even outright ban are vastly preferred options to a...