President-elect Donald Trump urged the Supreme Court on Friday to pause an impending ban on the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
Trump’s legal team filed a friend-of-the-court brief requesting the justices pause TikTok’s ban, due to go into effect on January 19, to give the president-elect time to negotiate a deal to keep the platform operating in the United States. The effort to ban TikTok gained bipartisan support earlier this year as critics accused the platform of threatening U.S. national security by collecting data on Americans.
In April, Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed legislation that included a ban on TikTok unless the social media platform can meet the terms outlined in the legislation, namely being sold off from its parent company, ByteDance. The legislation gave the social media platform 270 days to comply with the chance of an additional 90 days if the Biden administration assesses that ByteDance has made meaningful progress toward a sale.
TikTok sued the government over the ban, claiming that it violates the First Amendment.
“President Trump takes no position on the merits of the dispute,” Trump’s team wrote in its brief. “Instead, he urges the Court to stay the statute’s effective date to allow his incoming Administration to pursue a negotiated resolution that could prevent a nationwide shutdown of TikTok, thus preserving the First Amendment rights of tens of millions of Americans, while also addressing the government’s national security concerns.”
The Trump team argued in part that the ban on TikTok could set a negative precedent and example for other nations to follow, citing Brazil’s temporary ban on X earlier this year.
“[T]he First Amendment implications of the federal government’s effective shuttering of a social media platform used by 170 million Americans are sweeping and troubling,” the brief says. “There are valid concerns that the Act may set a dangerous global precedent by exercising the extraordinary power to shut down an entire social-media platform based, in large part, on concerns about disfavored speech on that platform.”
The brief pits the incoming Trump administration against the Biden administration, which says that TikTok’s Chinese ownership is a direct threat to U.S. national security. Top Republicans in Congress have also expressed support for the ban.
“TikTok collects vast swaths of data about tens of millions of Americans, which the PRC could use for espionage or blackmail,” the Department of Justice said in a brief to the Supreme Court. “And the PRC could covertly manipulate the platform to advance its geopolitical interests and harm the United States — by, for example, sowing discord and disinformation during a crisis.”
The post <a href=https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-asks-scotus-to-pause-tiktok-ban-to-pursue-a-negotiated-resolution target=_blank >Trump Asks SCOTUS To Pause TikTok Ban ‘To Pursue A Negotiated Resolution’</a> appeared first on Conservative Angle | Conservative Angle - Conservative News Clearing House
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