Trump Asks High Court To Pause Looming TikTok Divest-or-Ban Law

President-elect Trump on Friday asked the Supreme Court to pause a law that would force TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company or face a national ban by January 19, calling the looming deadline “unfortunate timing.” The bipartisan law at issue, the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” recently landed at the Supreme Court after months of heated legal debate over whether the divest-or-ban law is a First Amendment violation or a necessary national security measure. The Supreme Court has so far deferred pausing the law, instead setting oral arguments for January 10 in the highly-expedited case.“This case presents an unprecedented, novel, and difficult tension between free-speech rights on one side, and foreign policy and national security concerns on the other,” Trump’s amicus brief reads. “As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means.”Trump, who recently said he has a “warm spot” in his heart for TikTok because of his gains in the youth vote, noted in the brief he took “no position” on the underlying merits of the case. Instead, he requested the court to halt the law from going into effect the day before his inauguration, thus allowing the incoming administration “the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case.” The “unfortunate timing” of the January 19 divest-or-ban deadline “interferes with President Trump’s ability to manage the United States’ foreign policy and to pursue a resolution to both protect national security and save a social-media platform that provides a popular vehicle for 170 million Americans to exercise their core First Amendment rights,” the brief noted. Trump is “of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history,” the brief says, adding that he has 14.7 million followers on TikTok. His status as a founder of Truth Social also gives him “an in-depth perspective on the extraordinary government power attempted to be exercised in this case — the power of the federal government to effectively shut down a social-media platform favored by tens of millions of Americans, based in large part on concerns about disfavored content on that platform.”TikTok and the Biden administration also filed their main briefs on Friday, setting up a national security and First Amendment clash ahead of oral arguments. TikTok called the congressional divest-or-ban law an “unprecedented action” that would order the “shutdown of one of the most significant speech platforms in America.” TikTok argues that Congress “did not even consider obvious, less-burdensome means” than its divest-or-ban law and said that “The First Amendment does not tolerate such short-cuts.”A January 19 shuttering of the platform will silence the speech of 170 million monthly American users who use the app to communicate about “politics, arts, commerce, and other matters of public concern,” TikTok argues, “as illustrated by the massive interest expressed during the recent presidential election.”The federal government’s brief, also filed on Friday, focuses on national security concerns surrounding the app and maintains that the law merely targets the app’s foreign ownership. “TikTok collects vast swaths of data about tens of millions of Americans, which the PRC could use for espionage or blackmail,” the federal government argues. “And the PRC could covertly manipulate the platform to advance its geopolitical interests and harm the United States — by, for example, sowing discord and disinformation during a crisis.”The federal government says the law has nothing to do with speech restrictions and instead restricts “foreign adversary control.” “TikTok may continue operating in the United States and presenting the same content from the same users in the same manner if its current owner executes a divestiture that frees the platform from the PRC’s control,” the brief notes.

Trump Asks High Court To Pause Looming TikTok Divest-or-Ban Law

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