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The Supreme Court did not grant TikTok a last-minute reprieve.
If a popular social media site is to continue operating in the US, it should be saved by politicians or businessmen, not judges.
And policymakers, forced to balance national concerns about China and TikTok’s huge American user base, are taking note. This includes a future president who is both a politician and a businessman.
Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, President-elect Donald Trump wrote to Truth Social that he would review the situation, but that everyone should respect the Supreme Court’s decision.
“My decision on TikTok will be made in the near future, but I have to have time to consider the situation. Stay tuned!” he said.
Trump’s legal team has already weighed in on the case before the Supreme Court, asking the justices to delay the ruling to give him time to find a solution.
“Only President Trump has the superior deal-making experience, 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. Trump also spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the topic of TikTok came up.
Trump is filling his foreign policy team with China hawks like Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, who represent 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 fans.
If the incoming president can ultimately find a way to satisfy national security concerns while still supporting TikTok’s operations in the US, it could give him an early political victory in his second term and a loyal following. by TikTok users.
The Biden administration, for its part, seemed happy to dump the TikTok situation in the new president’s lap.
He quickly released a statement in response to the court’s ruling, which emphasized that the law’s purpose was not to ban TikTok, but to force it to sell to American property. However, as predicted, the outgoing Democratic president has entrusted the implementation of the ban to Donald Trump, who will become president at noon on Monday.
The Supreme Court, in its unsigned dissenting opinion, shied away from weighing this kind of political calculation. The justices 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.
While the court’s opinion is narrow — the justices acknowledge the time it took them to reach the decision — it makes a strong case that the constitutional protection of free speech found in the First Amendment to the US Constitution does not save TikTok.
In fact, the justices found that the ban on TikTok, which Congress justified by protecting national security by preventing opponents from collecting mass data on tens of millions of American users, has a lower agenda than laws that directly regulate speech content.
The court sidestepped other difficult questions — such as whether concerns about China’s influence over TikTok’s algorithm warranted a ban. But expect it to come up in future policy debates in Congress.
With the court’s ruling, TikTok exhausted its last chance to avoid the ban from taking effect. For Trump, however, the TikTok ban was his first presidential crisis, but also his first political opportunity.
