President-elect Donald Trump has weighed in on a forthcoming U.S. Supreme Court hearing that could decide the fate of short-form social video service TikTok in the coming weeks.
Last Friday, Trump invoked a legal doctrine known as “amicus curae” to file a so-called “friend of the court” brief, during which he took no position on the case at hand but encouraged the Supreme Court to delay its hearing on whether to approve an injunction that prevents TikTok from being banned in U.S. app stores.
The banishment is rooted in a law passed earlier this summer that forces TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to divest its U.S.-based business to a stateside entity. The law was rolled into a federal appropriations bill that was mainly intended to green-light financial funding for the wars in Ukraine and Israel. President Joe Biden signed the measure into law in April, and ByteDance filed its legal challenge soon after.
The law requires ByteDance to divest its U.S.-based business by January 19; if it doesn’t, the measure requires U.S. app stores run by Google, Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft and others to pull the TikTok app, making it unavailable for download to computers, phones, tablets and smart TVs.
The law doesn’t ban Americans from using the service, and the TikTok app currently installed on devices will continue to work as long as ByteDance and the manufacturers of those devices support it. But it makes TikTok much harder to access when users buy new devices or switch from one platform to another, or if they delete the app and decide they want to reinstall it at a later time, because it won’t be available in app stores. (Android and Microsoft users will still be able to download the app beyond app stores, but Apple device users cannot download apps that aren’t available whiten the Apple App Store).
Federal lawmakers and government officials alike have expressed concern that ByteDance collects personal viewing habits and other sensitive data on American users of the video platform, then shares that data with the Chinese government. ByteDance has denied this, but affirmed that the Chinese government would not allow it to move forward with a sale of the service.
ByteDance’s efforts to have the law put on hold have, so far, failed. In December, an appellate court declined to issue a preliminary injunction that would have frozen the law until the legal case could play out. ByteDance appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear oral arguments on the matter at a hearing scheduled for January 10, 2025 — just nine days before the law was set to take effect. Like the lower courts, the Supreme Court declined to issue an injunction or other type of legal stay, which means TikTok will still be pulled from app stores on January 19 unless there is some other type of legal intervention.
Trump was one of the original architects of a TikTok ban, effectuating numerous executive orders during his first term in office, including one that was strikingly similar to the law Biden signed in April. ByteDance originally agreed to divest its U.S.-based business to avoid a ban, then said it would file legal challenges against the Trump Administration, viewing his threats as an engagement of “protectionist trade” to boost his re-election support. (Trump wound up losing the 2020 presidential election; he won the popular vote and clinched enough electoral college votes to secure a second, non-consecutive term in office two months ago).
Since his original threat, some Trump loyalists have amassed large audiences on TikTok, as have those on the other side of the aisle, creating rifts between lawmakers who claim the app is a threat to national security and others who view it as a way to reach constituents.
Trump, apparently, falls into the latter these days, with the president-elect urging the Supreme Court to hold off on its hearing until after his inauguration..
“President Trump opposes banning TikTok in the United States at this juncture and seeks the ability to resolve the issue at hand through political means once he takes office,” the brief filed with the Supreme Court last week said. “President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making 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.”
The brief goes on to describe Trump as “one of the most powerful, prolific and influential users of social media in history,” and notes that he has 14.7 million followers on TikTok. (By comparison, Trump’s account on Truth Social — a social media platform that he owns — stood at 8.42 million as of Sunday morning).
The Biden administration filed its own brief last week, saying the law “addresses the serious threats to national security posed by the Chinese government’s control of TikTok, a platform that harvests sensitive data about tens of millions of Americans and would be a potent tool for covert influence operations by a foreign adversary.”
The Supreme Court has not weighed in on whether it will delay the hearing or issue a preemptive injunction until after the inauguration.
