TikTok Photo: VCG
President-elect Donald Trump is considering an executive order once in office that would suspend enforcement of the TikTok ban-or-sale law for 60 to 90 days, buying the administration time to negotiate a sale or alternative solution — a legally questionable effort to win a brief reprieve for the Chinese-owned app now scheduled to be banned on Sunday nationwide, the Washington Post reported, according to two people familiar with the deliberations.
The US Supreme Court held a two-hour discussion on January 10 regarding the future of TikTok in the US, according to an audio livestream on the court's website. On December 6, 2024, a US federal appeals court upheld a law requiring ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to divest the app in the US by January 19, 2025 or face a ban, Reuters reported.
Tiktok said in a statement in December that "We believe the Court will find the TikTok ban unconstitutional so the over 170 million Americans on our platform can continue to exercise their free speech rights."
As US TikTok users anxiously await the fate of TikTok as the US Supreme Court is set to rule if the platform has to be suspended in the US on January 19, a portion of the users from the US have flooded Xiaohongshu, a social media platform run by a Chinese company, to open accounts and engage with local Chinese users and their fellow US users. Amid growing concerns over a potential TikTok ban in the US, Xiaohongshu has surged in popularity, claiming the top spot on the Apple App Store's free downloads chart as of Monday night (US time).
China's Foreign Ministry said in last March that the proposed TikTok ban puts the US on the opposite side of the principle of fair competition and international economic and trade rules.?"If so-called 'national security' reasons can be used to arbitrarily suppress other countries' outstanding companies, then there is no fairness or justice left. When one sees something good from others, the goal should not be to seize it for oneself — this is entirely a robber's logic," the ministry said. It stressed that the way the US handles the TikTok issue will make the world see more clearly whether the so-called "rules" and "order" of the US are truly beneficial to the world or only serve the interests of the US itself.