The White House on Friday said that the TikTok ban will fall to President-elect Trump’s administration after the Supreme Court upheld a law requiring the app’s China-based parent company to divest from it.
The Supreme Court opted to side with the Biden administration days before the Trump inauguration, finding that the divest-or-ban law does not violate the First Amendment, teeing up a ban set to take effect Sunday.
“The Administration, like the rest of the country, has awaited the decision just made by the U.S. Supreme Court on the TikTok matter,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement. “Given the sheer fact of timing, this Administration recognizes that actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday.”
Trump on Friday told CNN in an interview that the TikTok ban is now up to him.
“It ultimately goes up to me, so you’re going to see what I’m going to do,” he said, without detailing what his decision will be.
Trump, who had previously criticized TikTok, has increasingly expressed sympathy with the app as the ban approached, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will attend his inauguration.
Jean-Pierre, in her statement, reiterated President Biden’s opinion on TikTok, which is that the app “should remain available to Americans, but simply under American ownership or other ownership that addresses the national security concerns identified by Congress in developing this law.”
The White House supported and Biden signed the bipartisan bill that passed Congress last April, which gave TikTok’s parent company ByteDance 270 days to divest from the app or face a ban from U.S. app stores.
Meanwhile, Trump had urged the justices to delay the deadline so he could negotiate a deal. The court on Friday was unanimous in its judgement, although Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch filed separate concurrences.
TikTok has argued divestment is not a feasible option and that it will “go dark” as of Sunday. But the court rejected those arguments, instead ruling in favor of the government.
