President Trump’s first big test: America’s TikTok ban
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President Donald Trump will be tested early after having taken charge of the Oval Office in the US White House. Last week, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law requiring the popular social media app TikTok to be divested in favour of non-Chinese ownership by its China-based parent company, ByteDance, or be banned.
The court rejected the social media company’s argument that the law violated the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its content creators. On Sunday, the app went ‘dark’ in the US [but on Monday, Trump issued an executive order to delay the ban by 75 days]. Yet, as president, it will be Trump’s duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed." That means he will have to enforce the statute.
The ban, passed with large bipartisan support and signed into law by former US president Joe Biden in April, was designed to protect the private data of US users from a hostile foreign adversary. During his first term, Trump issued an executive order prohibiting ByteDance from engaging in financial transactions in the US on the grounds that it posed a risk to national security because the app “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users and is susceptible to being used to further the interests of the Chinese government." Those sanctions were tied up in court and did not go into effect before Congress passed the current law. However, as Trump returns to the White House, he seems to have had a change of heart.
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