President-elect Donald Trump urged the U.S. Supreme Court to stop enforcing a law that would ban popular social media app Tiktok or force it to sell, believing that he should have time to continue to enforce the “political resolution after taking office ”.
The court will hear the debate on the case on January 10.
The law requires Tiktok’s Chinese owner Bontedance to sell the platform to a U.S. company or face an injunction. The U.S. Congress voted in April unless the app is sold by August until January 19.
Tiktok has more than 170 million U.S. users and its parents try to stop the law. But if the court does not rule out that they are in favor without divestment, the app could be effectively banned in the United States on January 19 the day before Trump took office.
Trump’s support for Tiktok is a reversal from 2020 when he tried to block U.S. apps and forced it to be sold to U.S. companies due to its Chinese ownership.
It also shows the company’s huge efforts to forge with Trump and his team during the presidential campaign.
“President Trump has no position on the fundamental merits of this dispute,” said D. John Sauer, Trump’s lawyer.
“Instead, he respectfully asked the court to consider the deadline for withdrawal of the bill on January 19, 2025, while taking into account the merits of the case, thus allowing President Trump’s administration a chance to resolve the political solution to the problem politically Program. Case,” he added.
Trump had previously met with Tiktok CEO Shou Zi Chew in December after the president-elect said he had a “warm place” for the app and he favored allowing Tiktok to stay in the United States for at least some time.
The president-elect also said he received billions of views on social media platforms during his presidential campaign.
Tiktok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company had previously said the Justice Department misunderstood its relationship with China, believing that its content recommendation engine and user data are stored on cloud servers operated by Oracle Corp in the United States, while content affecting U.S. users has been made in the United States The same is true for audit decisions.
Free speech advocates told the U.S. Supreme Court separately that U.S. laws against Tiktok evoke censorship systems enacted by authoritarian enemies in the United States.
The U.S. Department of Justice argues that China’s control of Tiktok poses an ongoing threat to national security, a position supported by most U.S. lawmakers.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen asked the Supreme Court to uphold a coalition of the state’s Tiktok divestiture or national legislation in a filing of amicus summary Friday.
©Thomson Reuters 2024
(This story has not been edited by Tech Word News’s staff and is automatically generated from the joint feed.)
