Can Donald Trump circumvent a TikTok ban?
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As the app is on the brink of being expelled, the president-elect has been working to make good on his pledge to save it. In the run-up to the election, Donald Trump made a plea to his followers. “FOR ALL THOSE THAT WANT TO SAVE TIK TOK IN AMERICA, VOTE TRUMP!” he posted to his Truth Social account in September. Since then, he’s been working to make good on that pledge.
He hosted TikTok’s CEO, Shou Chew, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in December, implored the US supreme court to delay a TikTok ban and he’s now reportedly considering an executive order to postpone the app’s disappearance. Chew is slated to join Trump at his inauguration in what appears to be a show of solidarity with the embattled executive.
TikTok is on the brink of being expelled from the US, unless it sells to a non-Chinese parent company. Its digital demise comes after Congress overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan law deeming the social media app a national security threat because it’s owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. TikTok has battled that law up to the supreme court. Now the company, along with its 170 million US users, is awaiting a ruling that seems increasingly unlikely to come before the 19 January deadline, as the court seemed skeptical of its legal arguments.
Though the law only requires the app to no longer be downloadable in smartphone app stores, TikTok itself is planning to shut down access to existing users the day the ban goes into effect, according to multiple reports. Biden’s administration is reportedly considering ways to keep TikTok available after 19 January, even though it was Joe Biden himself who signed the legislation into law last April.
