The Supreme Court did not grant TikTok a last-minute stay of execution.
If the popular social media site is to continue operating in the United States, it must be politicians or businessmen, not judges, who save it.
Politicians – who are under pressure to balance national concerns about China with TikTok's huge American user base – are taking notice. This includes the next president, who is both a politician and a businessman.
Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social saying he would review the situation, but everyone should respect the Supreme Court's decision.
He said: “My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I should have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!”
Trump's legal team was already involved while the Supreme Court was hearing this case, asking the justices to delay the decision to give him time to find a solution.
“Only President Trump has the savvy deal-making experience, electoral mandate, and political will to negotiate a solution to save the program,” the brief said.
They didn't get their wish, but several Trump aides have since floated the possibility of issuing a presidential executive order Monday afternoon to delay implementation of the ban. Trump also spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the topic of TikTok came up.
Trump is packing his foreign policy team with China hawks like Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz – who represent a popular view on the right that the Chinese Communists are not just an economic rival, but a geopolitical adversary.
But Trump has also spent the past year campaigning to support social media influencers — and their young followers — many of whom are TikTok fans.
If the next president can ultimately find a way to satisfy national security concerns while keeping TikTok up and running in the United States, it will provide him with a chance to score an early political victory in his second term and be celebrated by loyal TikTok users.
The Biden administration, for its part, seemed happy to drop TikTok’s status into the lap of the next president.
It quickly issued a statement responding to the court’s decision, stressing that the goal of the law is not to ban TikTok, but rather to force its sale to American ownership. But as expected, the outgoing Democratic president bet on implementing the ban on Donald Trump, who will become president on Monday afternoon.
The Supreme Court, in its unsigned and undissented opinion, avoided getting involved in this kind of political calculation. The justices sided with a lower court that upheld the constitutionality of the 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 — with the justices acknowledging the time pressure they were under to issue this decision — it powerfully demonstrates that the constitutional protections for free speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution do not save TikTok.
In fact, the justices found that the TikTok ban, which Congress justified on the grounds of protecting national security by preventing an adversary from amassing troves of data on tens of millions of American users, had a lower bar than laws directly regulating free speech. content.
The court sidestepped other difficult issues — such as whether concerns about Chinese influence on TikTok's algorithm justified a ban. But this is expected to come up in future policy debates in Congress.
With the court's decision, TikTok has exhausted its last legal means to avoid the ban coming into effect. However, for Trump, the TikTok ban is his first presidential crisis — but also his first political opportunity.
