US President-elect Donald Trump on Friday, the 27th of December, asked the US Supreme Court to postpone the upcoming TikTok ban, with his lawyer submitting a legal document to the court that says Trump is “opposed to banning TikTok” and “will seek to resolve the issues through political means once in office”, reports the BBC.
The US Supreme Court will hear all objections and arguments on the 10th of January on a law that requires TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the app to an American company or face a ban in the US by the 19th of January, the day before Trump takes office.
US officials allege that ByteDance has ties to the Chinese government, which led Congress to pass the law signed by President Joe Biden in April.
TikTok has about 170 million users in the US.
TikTok and its owner ByteDance deny any involvement with the Chinese government and have challenged the US law, claiming it undermines freedom of speech, without success. With no buyer yet found, their last chance to overturn the ban is before the US Supreme Court on the 10th of January.
Last week, Trump had a meeting with Shaw Zi-Choo, CEO of TikTok, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
In a court filing submitted on Friday, Trump said that the case represents “an unprecedented, novel and complex tension between free speech rights on the one hand and foreign policy and national security interests on the other”.
Although the submission stated that Trump “takes no position on the merits of this dispute”, it added that a delay of the 19th of January deadline would give Trump “an opportunity to reach a political solution” to this case without going to court.
The US Department of Justice and state governments consider TikTok’s links to China to be a security risk. Nearly 24 state attorneys general, led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, have asked the Supreme Court to uphold a law requiring the sale or banning of TikTok.
Trump has announced that he opposes the TikTok ban, although he supported it during his first presidency. Earlier in December, he claimed that TikTok helped him win the support of young people, even though most young voters supported his opponent, Kamala Harris.