In a brief submitted Friday, US President-elect Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to halt a bill that will outlaw TikTok the day before his inauguration on January 20 if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell it. Trump’s team pushed for “more breathing space” in a legal brief.
As Trump’s legal team stated, “the court should consider staying the statutory deadline to grant more breathing space to address these issues in light of the novelty and difficulty of this case.” This would allow Trump “the opportunity to pursue a political resolution.”
During his first term from 2017 to 21, Trump was adamantly against TikTok and made fruitless attempts to outlaw the video app on national security grounds.
The Republican expressed worries that the Chinese government would access the data of US TikTok users or alter what they view on the app, worries his political opponents have also expressed.
The success of the video-sharing app among youth had also alarmed US authorities, who claimed that the app’s parent business was beholden to Beijing and that it was being used to disseminate propaganda. Both the Chinese government and the firm denied these allegations.
Trump demanded that the government share the proceeds from the sale of TikTok to a US firm, and his successor Joe Biden went one step farther by enacting legislation banning the app for the same reasons.
Trump, however, has changed his mind and has now loosened his position. He announced his renewed backing for the app last week, pointing out that it needs competition from Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram.
“If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram — and that’s, you know, that’s Zuckerberg,” he told Bloomberg.
The change comes after Trump hinted at reconsidering the app’s possible ban during a meeting with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at Mar-a-Lago.
TikTok claims that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act violates its First Amendment rights and has filed a legal challenge to the statute.
