Donald Trump urged the US Supreme Court to delay the ban on TikTok

The allegations against an app with 170 million US users prompted Congress to pass a bill signed by President Joe Biden in April.

TikTok and ByteDance have filed multiple legal challenges to the law, arguing that it threatens America’s protections of free speech, with little success. As a potential buyer has not yet materialized, the companies’ last chance to overturn the ban was through the US Supreme Court.

Although the Supreme Court had previously declined to act on a request for an emergency ruling against the law, it agreed to allow TikTok, ByteDance and the US government to hear their cases on January 10, just days before the ban took effect.

Trump met with the CEO of TikTokShou Zi Chew at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida last week.

In his filing to the court on Friday, Trump said the case represented “an unprecedented, new and difficult tension between free speech rights on the one hand and foreign policy and national security concerns on the other.”

While the filing said Trump “has taken no position on the merits of this dispute,” it added that pushing back the January 19 deadline would allow Trump to “pursue a political resolution” of the matter without going to court. .

The US justice department has argued that China’s ties to TikTok are a national security threat – and many state governments have raised concerns about the popular social media app.

Nearly two dozen state attorneys general, led by Austin Knudsen of Montana, have urged the Supreme Court to uphold legislation that would force ByteDance and TikTok to take down or ban them.

In early December a federal appeals court rejected the attempt Repealing the legislation, he said, was “the culmination of extensive, bipartisan action by Congress and successive presidents.”

Trump has publicly said he opposes a ban, despite supporting one during his first term as president.

“I have a warm place in my heart for TikTok because I won the youth by 34 points,” he said at a press conference in early December, despite the majority of young voters supporting his opponent Kamala Harris.

“There are people who say that TikTok has something to do with it,” he said.