Dec. 30—The U.S. Supreme Court is holding a special session on Jan. 10, 2025, in order to hear challenges to the Jan. 19 implementation of the Congressional bill that would ban TikTok, and Donald Trump is among those who have filed briefs to the court.
“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,” his filing says. “President Trump opposes banning TikTok in the United States at this juncture and seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office.”
TikTok is an important forum for political debate, and Trump has the negotiating skills and social media savvy (including by founding the “resoundingly successful” Truth Social) to address the issue politically.
“President Trump … has a compelling interest as the incoming embodiment of the Executive Branch in seeing the statutory deadline stayed to allow his incoming Administration the opportunity to seek a negotiated resolution of these questions. If successful, such a resolution would obviate the need for this Court to decide the historically challenging First Amendment question presented here on the current, highly expedited basis.”
It was on Dec. 6, 2024 that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied a petition to delay the implementation of the law on constitutional grounds. The decision concludes with this absurd claim: “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” {emphasis added]
Trump’s support for the social media platform represents a dramatic change in his outlook. Trump spoke of banning TikTok in the summer of 2020, and on Aug. 6, 2020 he issued an executive order to force its parent company, ByteDance, to divest. A court blocked Trump’s executive order on the grounds that Trump had exceeded his presidential authority. Biden formally revoked Trump’s ban in 2021.
By 2024, he defended the platform, where he had amassed a significant following, saying, for example, that young people “will go crazy without it.” On Sept. 4, 2024, he urged supporters of the platform to vote for him: “We’re not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side’s going to close it up. So if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump.”
The so-called TikTok ban does not prevent current users from continuing to use the popular app. It removes TikTok downloads from Google Play and Apple Play and other app stores, effectively banning new user download.s; It will also restrict future updates. The restrictions would be removed if the app is divested from its Chinese parent company.