The Supreme Court did not give TikTok a deadline to execute.
If the popular social network is to continue operating in the US, it will have to be politicians or businessmen, not judges, who keep it alive.
And politicians — pressed to balance national concerns about China with TikTok's huge American user base — are taking note. This includes the future president, who is a politician and businessman.
Shortly after the Supreme Court's decision, President-elect Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social saying that he will review the situation, but everyone must respect the Supreme Court's decision.
“My decision on TikTok will be made in the near future, but I should have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!,” he said.
Trump's legal team was already responding when the Supreme Court considered the case, asking the judges to delay the decision to give him time to find a solution.
“President Trump alone has the experience, electoral authority, and political will to negotiate a resolution to save the field,” the brief read.
They didn't get their wish, but several Trump aides have since expressed the possibility that the president's executive order on Monday afternoon could delay implementation of the ban. Trump also spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the topic of TikTok came up.
Trump is putting together his foreign policy team with China hawks like Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz – who represent the popular view that the Chinese Communists are more than just an economic rival, they are a national enemy.
But Trump has also spent the past year campaigning for the support of social media influencers — and their young followers — many of whom are TikTok devotees.
If the incoming president can find a way to satisfy national security concerns while keeping TikTok active in the US, it will give him an opportunity to post political wins early in his second term and be celebrated by loyal TikTok users.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, seemed happy to dump the TikTok situation in the incoming president's lap.
It quickly issued a statement in response to the court's decision, stressing that the purpose of the law is not to block TikTok, but to force its sale to American owners. As predicted, however, the outgoing Democratic president approved the ban on Donald Trump, who will become president at noon on Monday.
The Supreme Court, in its unsigned dissenting opinion, avoided delving into this kind of political calculation. The justices sided with a lower court on constitutionality that could shut down the popular social media platform if it is not sold by midnight on Sunday.
Although the court's opinion is small – the judges admit the time pressure they were under to issue this decision – it firmly confirms that the constitutional protection of free speech contained in the First Amendment of the US Constitution does not protect TikTok.
In fact, the judges found that the ban on TikTok, which Congress justified on the basis of protecting national security by preventing the adversary from collecting data on tens of millions of American users, had a lower threshold of clarity than laws that directly regulate speech. content.
The court sidestepped other tricky issues — such as whether concerns about Chinese influence on TikTok's algorithm were worth the ban. But expect that to come up in future policy debates in Congress.
With the court's ruling, TikTok has used its last legal recourse to avoid the ban going into effect. For Trump, however, the TikTok ban is his first presidential disaster — but also his first political opportunity.
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