US President-elect Donald Trump has asked the US Supreme Court to delay the upcoming TikTok ban while he works on a “political solution”.
His lawyer filed a legal brief on Friday with the court saying Trump “opposes the TikTok ban” and “seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once in office.”
On January 10, the court is scheduled to hear arguments on a US law requiring ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, to sell the social media company to an American company or face a ban on January 19, one day before Trump takes office. .
US officials and lawmakers have accused ByteDance of ties to the Chinese government, which the company denies.
These allegations about an app that has 170 million users in the United States led Congress to pass a bill in April, which President Joe Biden signed into law, that includes requirements for withdrawal or bans.
TikTok and ByteDance have filed several legal challenges against the law, arguing that it threatens American freedom of expression protections, with little success. With no potential buyer yet, the companies' last chance to block the ban was through the US Supreme Court.
While the Supreme Court previously declined to act on a request for an emergency injunction against the law, it agreed to allow TikTok, ByteDance and the US government to plead their cases on January 10 — just days before the ban goes into effect.
Trump met with the CEO of TikTokXu Zi Qiu, at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, last week.
In his court filing on Friday, Trump said the case represents “an unprecedented, new, and difficult tension between free speech rights on the one hand, and foreign policy and national security concerns on the other.”
While the filing said Trump “takes no position on the merits of this dispute,” it added that postponing the January 19 deadline would give Trump “the opportunity to pursue a political resolution” to the matter without having to go to court. .
The US Department of Justice has argued that alleged Chinese ties to TikTok pose a national security threat – and multiple state governments have raised concerns about the popular social media app.
Nearly two dozen state attorneys general, led by Austin Knudsen of Montana, urged the Supreme Court to uphold the law that forces ByteDance and TikTok to divest or ban them.
Earlier in December, A federal appeals court rejected that attempt to repeal the legislation, saying it is “the culmination of broad, bipartisan work by Congress and successive presidents.”
Trump has said publicly that he opposes the ban, despite supporting it in his first term as president.
“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok, because I won the young people by 34 points,” he said at a press conference earlier in December, even though the majority of young voters supported his challenger, Kamala Harris.
He added: “There are those who say that TikTok has something to do with this.”
