Trump says may keep TikTok around “for a little while”
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday suggested that he may allow TikTok to continue operations in the United States.
At an event hosted by the conservative organization Turning Point USA in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump said that the popular video-sharing app may have helped reach some key voters in the presidential election, and expressed the possibility of keeping TikTok around “for a little while.”
“We did go on TikTok, and we had a great response. We had billions and billions of views,” said the president-elect, adding that he was shown a chart highlighting the views his campaign had received on the app.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a request from TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to block a law that would require the sale of the popular video-sharing app by Jan. 19, or face a ban on national security grounds.
The nation’s top court is set to hear arguments on Jan. 10 regarding whether the law unconstitutionally limits freedom of speech, in breach of the First Amendment.
The court’s ruling was issued two days after TikTok’s petition for an injunction against the law. TikTok argued that the potential ban would shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration, and “silence the speech of Applicants and the many Americans who use the platform to communicate about politics, commerce, arts, and other matters of public concern.”
In April, U.S. President Joe Biden enacted the law that gives ByteDance only 270 days to sell TikTok, citing unfounded national security concerns. If the company fails to comply, the law will require app store operators such as Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their platforms.
In May, TikTok sued the U.S. government to block the potential ban, which has drawn widespread criticism.
In early December, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. dismissed TikTok’s claim that the ban is unconstitutional.
Reference Link:- https://english.news.cn/20241223/25afd7261369414bb25a3aa45473b1f4/c.html
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
