Two weeks before the Supreme Court hears arguments on the future of TikTok, President-elect Donald Trump has asked the justices to postpone the Jan. 19 deadline by which the app must be sold to a new owner or it will be banned in the United States.
Trump’s nominee to be solicitor general, John Sauer, has asked the court to grant a stay of the deadline so that the incoming president can negotiate a solution that can save the app while protecting U.S. interests and security.
“This Court should be deeply concerned about setting a precedent that could create a slippery slope toward global government censorship of social media speech,” Sauer said, “The power of a Western government to ban an entire social-media platform with more than 100 million users, at the very least, should be considered and exercised with the most extreme care—not reviewed on a ‘highly expedited basis.’”
The law ordering the sale of TikTok had been signed in April by President Biden, only to be approved by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in early December.
The decision could be a death blow to the app in one of its most important markets. There are more than 170 million Americans who use social platforms on a daily basis. The law requires ByteDance to sell the app to a non-Chinese company by Jan. 19, for national security reasons.
U.S. officials fear the close ties between the company and Beijing, which could use the platform to get its hands on the personal data of millions of U.S. citizens. For its part, the company has ruled out the possibility of selling the platform, as it would be a move that would find opposition from the Chinese government itself.
Even Trump himself had initially sought to ban TikTok during his first term in the White House. During the last election campaign, however, his attitude toward the social network changed dramatically: the MAGA leader repeated on several occasions that he wanted to “save” the app.
