The Supreme Court did not grant TikTok a last-minute stay of execution.
If the popular social network is going to continue to operate in the US, it will have to be saved by politicians or businessmen, not judges.
And politicians — under pressure to balance national concerns about China with TikTok’s massive American user base — are taking note. This includes the future president, who is both a politician and a businessman.
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling, President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social saying he would review the situation, but everyone must respect the Supreme Court’s decision.
“My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I need to have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!” he said.
Trump’s legal team has already stepped in during the Supreme Court’s consideration of the case, asking the justices to delay the decision to give him time to find a solution.
“President Trump alone possesses the superior negotiating expertise, electoral mandate and political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform,” the summary said.
They didn’t get their wish, but several Trump aides have since raised the possibility of a presidential executive order on Monday afternoon delaying the ban’s implementation. Trump also spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the topic of TikTok also came up.
Trump is stocking his foreign policy team with China hawks like Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz—who espouse the popular right-wing view that the Chinese Communists are more than an economic rival, they are a geopolitical adversary.
But Trump has also spent the past year campaigning for the support of social media influencers — and their young followers — many of whom are TikTok devotees.
If the president-elect can ultimately find a way to satisfy national security concerns while keeping TikTok healthy in the US, it would give him an opportunity to score an early political victory in his second term and be celebrated by TikTok’s loyal users.
The Biden administration, for its part, seemed happy to dump the TikTok situation in the future president’s lap.
A statement was soon released reacting to the court’s decision, noting that the goal of the law is not to ban TikTok, but to force its sale into American ownership. However, as predicted, the outgoing Democratic president put the ban on Donald Trump, who will become president at noon on Monday.
The Supreme Court, in its unsigned unopposed opinion, avoided weighing in on such political calculations. The judges sided with a lower court that upheld the constitutionality of a law that could ban the popular social media service if it is not sold by midnight on Sunday.
Although the court’s opinion is narrow — the justices acknowledge the time pressure they were under to make this decision — it firmly establishes that the constitutional protection of free speech contained in the First Amendment to the US Constitution does not save TikTok.
In fact, the judges found that TikTok’s ban, which Congress justified on the grounds of protecting national security by preventing adversaries from collecting reams of data on tens of millions of American users, had a lower bar than laws directly regulating speech content.
The court sidestepped other tricky issues — like whether concerns about Chinese influence over TikTok’s algorithm justified the ban. But expect it to come up in future policy debates in Congress.
With the court’s decision, TikTok has exhausted its last legal recourse to avoid the ban taking effect. However, for Trump, the TikTok ban is his first presidential crisis – but also his first political opportunity.
