Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to delay the TikTok ban so he can weigh in after he takes office. Currently, the ban on the popular social media app is scheduled to take effect on January 19, 2025 — one day before Trump is set to take office.
Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to delay the TikTok ban so he can weigh in after he takes office. Currently, the ban on the popular social media app is scheduled to take effect on January 19, 2025 — one day before Trump is set to take office.
In a 25-page brief filed with the court, Trump asked the nine justices for a stay on the deadline so his administration could “pursue a negotiated resolution” that would “obviate the need” for the justices to issue a ruling on the case.
“President Trump takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute. Instead, he respectfully requests that the Court consider staying the Act’s deadline for divestment of January 19, 2025, while it considers the merits of this case,” the brief stated. “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government — concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged.”
Currently, the ban on the popular social media app is scheduled to take effect on January 19, 2025 — one day before Trump is set to take office. (
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AFP via Getty Images)
The filing of the brief comes two weeks before oral arguments scheduled for Jan. 10 on whether the law, which requires TikTok to divest from its China-based parent company or face a ban, unlawfully restricts speech in violation of the First Amendment. It was previously reported earlier this month that a panel of three federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously upheld the statute, leading TikTok to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
At the center of the case is a law called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. This comes as both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concern that the Chinese government could access data about American users.
Tiktok, which operates under the parent company of ByteDance, claimed the law violated their First Amendment right. “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the court’s opinion. “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.”
Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concern that the Chinese government could access data about American users. (
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“Consequently, TikTok’s millions of users will need to find alternative media of communication,” Ginsburg said. “That burden is attributable to the [People’s Republic of China’s] hybrid commercial threat to U.S. national security, not to the U.S. Government, which engaged with TikTok through a multi-year process in an effort to find an alternative solution.”
Trump’s vow to “save the app” is a stark reversal from the man’s previous stance when he tried to ban the app during his first term only to promise during the 2024 election cycle that he would defend the app. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that required Bytedance to sell the app to a U.S. owner within a year or face being shut down.
One month later, the app sued the government claiming that it could not be used by Beijing to spy on or manipulate Americans. Its attorneys have accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit.
