Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The Supreme Court did not grant TikTok a last-minute stay of execution.
If the popular social networking site is to continue operating in the United States, it will have to be politicians or businessmen, not judges, who save it.
And politicians, pressured to balance national concerns about China with TikTok’s huge American user base, are taking note. This includes the incoming president, who is both a politician and a businessman.
Shortly after the high court ruling, President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social saying he would review the situation, but that everyone should respect the Supreme Court’s decision.
“My decision on TikTok will be made in the not-too-distant future, but I must have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!” he said.
Trump’s legal team had already weighed in during the Supreme Court’s consideration of this case, asking the justices to delay the decision to give him time to find a solution.
“Only President Trump has the consummate experience in negotiating agreements, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution that saves the platform,” the letter reads.
They didn’t get their wish, but several of Trump’s advisers have since raised the possibility of a presidential executive order Monday afternoon delaying implementation of the ban. Trump also spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the topic of TikTok came up.
Trump is staffing his foreign policy team with China hawks like Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, who represent a popular right-wing view that the Chinese communists are more than an economic rival, they are a geopolitical adversary.
But Trump 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 incoming president can finally find a way to satisfy national security concerns while keeping TikTok up and running in the US, it would give him a chance to score an early political victory in his second term and be celebrated by loyal TikTok users.
The Biden administration, for its part, seemed happy to leave the TikTok situation in the hands of the incoming president.
He was quick to issue a statement in response to the court’s decision, emphasizing that the goal of the law is not to ban TikTok, but to force its sale to American owners. However, as expected, the outgoing Democratic president attributed the implementation of the ban to Donald Trump, who will assume the presidency at noon Monday.
The Supreme Court, in its anonymous opinion without dissent, avoided commenting on this type of political calculations. The justices sided with a lower court that upheld the constitutionality of the law that could ban the popular social media service if it is not sold by midnight Sunday.
While the court’s opinion is limited (the justices acknowledge the time pressure they had in issuing this decision), it firmly establishes that the constitutional protections of free speech contained in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution do not save TikTok.
In fact, the judges found that the ban on TikTok, which Congress justified based on protecting national security by preventing an adversary from collecting large amounts of data on tens of millions of American users, had a lower bar than the laws that directly regulate speech. content.
The court sidestepped other sensitive issues, such as whether concerns about Chinese influence on TikTok’s algorithm justified a ban. But let’s hope that comes up in future policy debates in Congress.
With the court decision, TikTok has exhausted its last legal recourse to prevent the ban from taking effect. For Trump, however, the TikTok ban is his first presidential crisis, but also his first political opportunity.
