Author: Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump urged the U.S. Supreme Court to pause a federal TikTok law that would have banned the popular social media app or forced its sale, and the Republican U.S. president-elect says he should have time after taking office to continue the “political solution” of the problem.
TikTok and its owner ByteDance are fighting to keep the popular app online in the United States after Congress voted in April to ban it unless the app’s Chinese parent company sells it by January 19.
They asked for the law to be repealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. But unless a court rules in ByteDance’s favor and the sale goes through, the app could be effectively banned in the United States on January 19, the day before Trump takes office.
“This case presents an unprecedented, new and difficult tension between the right to free speech on the one hand and foreign policy and national security concerns on the other,” Trump said in a filing Friday.
“Such a stay would vitally give President Trump an opportunity to seek a policy solution that could avoid the need for a court to rule on these constitutionally significant issues,” the filing added.
Free speech advocates separately told the Supreme Court on Friday that the US law against Chinese-owned TikTok is reminiscent of censorship regimes established by authoritarian enemies of the United States.
Trump indicated earlier this week that he favors TikTok continuing to operate in the United States at least for a while, saying it received billions of views on the social media platform during his presidential campaign.
The US Department of Justice has argued that China’s control over TikTok poses a continuing threat to national security, a position supported by most US lawmakers.
TikTok says the Justice Department misrepresented the social media app’s ties to China, claiming its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the United States on cloud servers it manages Oracle Corp (NYSE:) while content moderation decisions affecting US users are also made in the United States.
