Voldemort now has X which is friendly to him. He's permanently wounded left leaning mainstream media and now has his sights on that like f-cker Mark Zuckerberg. How to screw Mark? Negotiate a deal where TikTok can continue to grab market share from Mark in the US in return for being "fair" to our new Commander and Chief.
Plus that should keep Google in line as well (which one's Utube the other thorn in his side).
Trump Asks Supreme Court to Pause TikTok Shutdown
President-elect says potential ban of social-media giant can be avoided through negotiated resolution
By Jacob Gershman, WSJ
Updated Dec. 27, 2024 7:19 pm ET
President-elect Donald Trump on Friday asked the Supreme Court to stop a federal law banning TikTok from taking effect next month, saying he wants to pursue a negotiated resolution to prevent a nationwide shutdown of the social-media giant.
In a brief filed to the court, Trump said keeping TikTok operating would preserve the First Amendment rights of tens of millions of Americans.
“The First Amendment implications of the federal government’s effective shuttering of a social media platform used by 170 million Americans are sweeping and troubling,” wrote attorney John Sauer, Trump’s planned nominee for solicitor general.
Trump stopped short of pronouncing the law unconstitutional as TikTok has argued. But he expressed deep reservations with the ban, telling justices that it is possible to spare TikTok while addressing the national security concerns that drove Congress to enact it.
The Supreme Court is set to decide the constitutionality of the ban, which is scheduled to take effect Jan. 19 unless justices intervene. Congress passed the ban earlier this year with bipartisan support, in response to concerns that China could exploit TikTok’s influence and user data to covertly spread propaganda and surveil Americans.
The law signed by President Biden in April conditioned TikTok’s survival on a sale to a non-Chinese owner, and it gave parent company ByteDance 270 days to divest itself of the platform. Beijing-based ByteDance has said it can’t and won’t sell its U.S. business.
Trump’s misgivings with the TikTok ban are a departure from his previous position. In his first administration, he unsuccessfully sought to shut down the platform. Trump’s recent concerns with the law also put him at odds with many Republican lawmakers who joined with Democrats in seeing TikTok and its Chinese ownership as a national security threat warranting unprecedented action. Never before has the U.S. shut down such a large and popular website.
It is unclear how Trump intends to save TikTok and deal with the security issues around its ownership and the constraints in the law. The brief said Trump is confident that he can get a deal and didn’t elaborate.
Trump can’t unilaterally wipe away an act of Congress, though the law does allow the president to lift the ban if his administration determines the site is no longer under Chinese control.
TikTok and a group of content creators who also filed suit argued that the First Amendment didn’t permit the government from eliminating a major medium of communication. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected their claims, saying the law restricted its ownership by a foreign adversary, not the content on the site.
The ban doesn’t make it a crime for TikTok’s 170 million U.S. users to keep using the app. But it prohibits mobile app stores, such as Google’s and Apple’s, from letting users download or update it and bars internet hosting services from supporting the app, effectively shutting it down in the U.S.
TikTok argued that it had spent billions of dollars walling off its data from China. The U.S. government said those measures were ineffective against China, where ByteDance is subject to Chinese security laws requiring the company to grant Beijing full access to its data and cooperate with criminal and security investigations.
In asking for a delay, Trump appeared sympathetic to TikTok’s legal case. “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,” his brief stated.
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