Survey of 1,349 US adults finds 40% support Trump's threatened ban on TikTok if a US buyer cannot be found, with responses split along party lines
WASHINGTON/ NEW YORK (Reuters) - Forty percent of Americans back President Donald Trump's threat to ban videosharing app TikTok if it is not sold …
Context & Ripple Effects
This Reuters poll is the opening data point in what became a five-year measurement of American appetite for banning TikTok. Support started at 40% here with a clear partisan split, climbed to 41% in a March 2023 Washington Post poll where 71% worried about ByteDance's Chinese ownership, peaked around 50% when a Reuters/Ipsos survey found 58% believed Beijing used the app to influence US opinion (May 2024), and then slid to 34% in Pew's March 2025 survey.
The partisan alignment also inverted at the top: the president whose threat this poll measured went on to declare Facebook the 'true enemy' and endorse TikTok outright (March 2024), which tracks with Republican ban support falling from 60% to 50% in Pew's December 2023 follow-up.
First-order effects
- The 40% figure hands Trump a working plurality — not a majority — behind his divestiture-or-ban threat, with Republican respondents supplying most of the support and TikTok's US user base the population directly exposed to the outcome.
Second-order effects
- ByteDance's path of least resistance becomes finding a US buyer to neutralize the threat rather than contesting public opinion, and subsequent reporting flagged that proposed deal structures still carried purported links to China — keeping the political risk alive even after a sale.
Third-order effects
- The polling arc — 40% in 2020 rising toward 50% by 2023-24, then falling to 34% by 2025 while the same president flipped from threatening the ban to defending the app — suggests American ban sentiment tracks partisan leadership cues more than any fixed view of national-security risk, complicating any long-term regulatory case built on public backing.
The trend: US public support for banning TikTok followed a rise-and-fall arc driven more by partisan positioning than by stable security concerns.