- TikTok’s Chinese owners have until Jan 19 to sell the app of face a U.S. ban
- The plan divides the Republican Party, pitting Trump against his former VP
- READ MORE: Is TikTok getting banned?
With the clock ticking down to the Jan. 19 deadline for TikTok‘s Chinese owners to sell the app or face a U.S. ban, the Supreme Court will hear arguments for and against the wildly popular video sharing platform on Friday.
And it pits President-elect Donald Trump, who credits TikTok with helping power him to election victory, against former allies in the form of Mike Pence, his vice president for four years, and Mitch McConnell, who led Republicans in the Senate.
At issue is whether it poses a national security risk, potentially feeding data from American phones to the Chinese Communist Party via its owners ByteDance.
The company will argue that the ban, passed by Congress signed into law by President Joe Biden, should be overturned.
And it has found an unlikely ally in Trump, who pushed for its ban during his first term, but now wants the law put on hold.
‘It’s a tough decision to make,’ he told CNBC in March interview. ‘Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok who love it.’
It is not hard to see why Trump might love it.
He recently shared a graphic with data apparently showing how he outperforms such cultural phenomena as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
It claimed that each of his posts on the platform got an average of 24 million views and that #Trump generated 36 billion total views.
Last month he told a conservative audience in Arizona that the data has persuaded him it might be worth keeping TikTok.
‘They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I looked at it, I said, “Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while,”‘ he he told the crowd.
His lawyers filed a paper in support of TikTok to the Supreme Court.
‘Furthermore, President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government—concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged,’ they wrote.
He and TikTok’s supporters argue that the law runs afoul of the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech.
Insiders say Trump will do whatever he can to prevent TikTok being switched off in the U.S.
A senior Republican strategist said: ‘By all measures TikTok is a conservative platform now – if you take a look at how Trump dominated his competition there’s no argument against the value this platform has and I don’t think there’s a world where Trump doesn’t fulfill his promise to save it.’
But the Justice Department in arguments defending the law says TikTok is a risk because of its access to huge amounts of data from American phones and their users.
Trump’s former vice president agrees.
‘The Constitution empowers Congress to defend our nation against threats from adversaries,’ lawyers for Pence’s Advancing American Freedom told the Supreme Court. ‘The First Amendment is not an open door to our adversaries, and there is no First Amendment that applies to the Chinese Communist Party.’
McConnell’s brief says TikTok was seeking a delay in the hope that the incoming Trump administration would be more lenient.
‘This is a standard litigation play at the end of one administration, with a petitioner hoping that the next administration will provide a stay of execution,’ he said.
‘This Court should no more countenance it coming from foreign adversaries than it does from hardened criminals.’
