President-elect Donald Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay implementation of a law subjecting TikTok to a national ban on Jan. 19 if its parent company doesn’t sell the platform.
Trump, in a friend-of-the-court brief supporting neither side filed on Friday, says he can reach a deal to balance the national security and First Amendment considerations posed by the contentious law.
While underscoring that he “takes no positions on the merits of the dispute,” Trump says he “alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.”
ByteDance has 22 days remaining to sell the platform. If it doesn’t meet the deadline, web-hosting services and mobile app stores would be barred from carrying the app, which amounts to an effective national ban.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court said it would review the case on Jan. 10 after a federal appeals court sided with the government in upholding the law. Under the streamlined schedule, the justices would have just nine days to issue a ruling deciding the fate of the leading video-sharing app in America with more than 170 million domestic monthly active users.
In Friday’s filing, Trump cautions the court against deciding “unprecedented” and “very significant constitutional questions” on a fast-tracked schedule.
“Staying this deadline would provide breathing space for the Court to consider the questions on a more measured schedule, and it would provide President Trump’s incoming Administration an opportunity to pursue a negotiated resolution of the conflict,” writes D. John Sauer, a lawyer for Trump.
Also at play: the possibility that the disputed law encroaches on Trump’s authority as president to oversee foreign policy. He points to the imposition of a deadline for divestment one day before he takes office.
“As to TikTok alone, the Act makes the determination for the Executive Branch—thus effectively binding the hands of the incoming Trump Administration on a significant point of foreign policy,” Sauer writes. “But the Executive, not Congress, is primarily charged with responsibility for the United States’ national security, its foreign policy, and its strategic relationship with its geopolitical rivals.”
Overall, Trump signals his support for TikTok’s opposition to the law, which he says “exercises an extraordinary power” in effectively shutting down a massively popular platform critical to free speech. He cites the possibility of “inadvertently setting a troubling global precedent” that started when a Brazil court blocked X for failing to deactivate the accounts of supporters of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro who allegedly spread false information and threats against Supreme Court justices.
Trump argues that the federal appeals court that upheld the law gave limited consideration to the free speech interests of TikTok users. He says the court gave too much deference to national security officials calling for social media censorship.
Government officials and lawmakers have repeatedly said TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, poses a national security threat. Thus far, they’ve offered no evidence that TikTok has provided user data to the Chinese government or that it’s been directed to influence the content users see on the platform. Amid years of congressional infighting to ban the app, lawmakers have failed to pass comprehensive data privacy legislation that would protect all users from companies that indiscriminately amass all kinds of personal information on consumers.
