US President-elect Donald Trump has asked the US Supreme Court to delay the upcoming ban on TikTok while he works on a “political solution”.
His lawyer filed a legal document on Friday in court saying that Trump “opposes the ban on TikTok” and “wants the power to solve existing problems through political means once he takes office”.
On January 10, the court will hear arguments on a US law that requires TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the social media company to a US company or face a ban on January 19 – the day before Trump takes office.
US officials and lawmakers have accused ByteDance of ties to the Chinese government – which the company denies.
Those allegations about the app, which has 170 million users in the US, led Congress to pass a bill in April, which President Joe Biden signed into law, that includes a requirement to isolate or block.
TikTok and ByteDance have filed multiple legal challenges against the law, saying it threatens America’s free speech protections, with little success. Since the consumer can only exist so far, the last chance for companies to end the ban is the US Supreme Court.
Although the Supreme Court has previously refused to act on a request for emergency legislation, it has agreed to allow TikTok, ByteDance and the US government to plead their case on January 10 – just days before the ban goes into effect.
Trump met with the CEO of TikTokShou Zi Chew, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last week.
Testifying in court on Friday, Trump said the case represented “an unprecedented, novel, and difficult conflict between free speech rights on the one hand, and foreign policy and national security concerns on the other”.
While the petition said Trump is “not taking a position on the underlying causes of this dispute”, it added that pushing back the January 19 deadline would give Trump “an opportunity to pursue a political resolution” to the issue without having to go to court. .
The US justice department has said China’s alleged links to TikTok pose a national security threat – and several state governments have expressed concern about the popular social media app.
About a dozen state attorneys led by Austin Knudsen of Montana urged the Supreme Court to uphold the law forcing ByteDance and TikTok to separate or be banned.
Earlier in December, the appeals court rejected the attempt overturning the law, saying it was “the culmination of massive, bipartisan action by Congress and successive presidents.”
Trump has publicly said that he opposes this ban, even though he supported one in his first term as president.
“I have a warm place in my heart for TikTok, because I won the youth by 34 points,” he said at a press conference in early December, even though the majority of young voters supported his opponent, Kamala Harris.
“Some say that TikTok has something to do with that,” he added.
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