Biden Suddenly Scrambles to Save TikTok
Joe Biden signed a law earlier this year banning the app.
President Joe Biden is suddenly looking for ways to keep TikTok alive in the U.S. market, despite the fact that he was the one to sign a law banning it in the first place.
“Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” a Biden official told NBC News, noting that the administration is “exploring options” to keep TikTok from going offline.
TikTok is reportedly prepared to shut down its app on Sunday, when the ban is scheduled to take effect, though the actual language of the law technically only mandates that the platform be taken off app stores to prevent new users from downloading it.
The forty-sixth president has just two days left in office before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House. Reinterpreting the law could save Biden’s final days atop the executive branch from being marred by the massively unpopular ban and effectively defer the issue to the MAGA leader.
The Supreme Court is poised to weigh on whether the law banning TikTok is constitutional. Trump filed a brief with the court last month, urging the bench to pass on ruling on the ban until he takes office, when his lawyers argue he could “pursue a political resolution that could obviate the Court’s need to decide these constitutionally significant questions.”
But Trump has not always been on TikTok’s side. Before he left office in 2020, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order. He claimed that the video-sharing platform threatened “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
Meanwhile, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will attend Trump’s inauguration, sitting on the dais alongside other Silicon Valley leaders, a Trump transition source told Axios. He will join X owner Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. All of these men have opportunistically caved to the incoming forty-seventh president’s politics since he won in November, in an apparent bid to curry the executive’s favor on the advent of a tech-centric, AI-fueled future.