Convicted felon, Donald Trump, is filing a request to delay the Supreme Court proceedings involving TikTok.
It’s one of the major free speech battlefronts in the US right now. The mainstream media in both Canada and the US have been pushing conspiracy theories about how TikTok is some sort of Chinese mind controlling device designed to utilize funny cat video’s and dance video’s to hypnotize people into doing the bidding of the Chinese communist party. Because these conspiracy theories are so ridiculous, however, the mainstream media have taken to vaguely calling it all “national security concerns” while rarely, if ever, going into the details about what those “concerns” actually are these days and hoping no one would notice.
Of course, back in the real world, there are major concerns about the implications for the free speech of millions of American’s should a whole platform get arbitrarily banned. Free speech in the US took a major blow earlier this month when a court ruled that banning whole platforms somehow protects free speech. Actual experts on internet censorship and free speech collectively threw their hands up in the air and gave a general “WTF?” response to the ruling. This is because censorship is the technically the exact opposite of freedom of expression and saying that government removing free speech protects free speech is about as absurd as it gets.
Well, unsurprisingly, the ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). In a positive sign, the court agreed to hear the case. It’s a positive sign because if SCOTUS said that it wouldn’t agree to hear the case, then the lower court ruling would stand and TikTok would run out of legal options.
Apparently, there is an added complication being thrown in. It appears that convicted felon, Donald Trump, is weirdly trying to fight the ban. According to the BBC, Trump has filed to delay the hearing so that he could intervene sometime after taking office:
US President-elect Donald Trump has asked the US Supreme Court to delay an upcoming TikTok ban while he works on a “political resolution”.
His lawyer filed a legal brief on Friday with the court that says Trump “opposes banning TikTok” and “seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office”.
On 10 January, the court is due to hear arguments on a US law that requires TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the social media company to an American firm or face a ban come 19 January – a day before Trump takes office.
The move is generally eyebrow raising given what happened back in Trumps first term. You might recall the famous Tulsa rally of 2020. In that incident, several users of TikTok began purchasing tickets to the Trump rally as a prank because they had no intention of showing up. Organizers, of course, had no clue and figured that sales are very high. So, they created spillover viewing areas with flat screen TV’s. Then, when the rally happened, very few people showed up. Organizers desperately tried to get everyone in the overflow areas to come into the stadium as they did everything they could to fill seats. The problem was that there was nowhere near enough people to fill those seats in the first place.
This led to famous shots of whole sections of seats being completely empty. While the rally went ahead, the fact that so few people showed up became a humiliating blow for Trump as he always tried bragging about crowd sizes.
Shortly after, Trump took a helicopter ride back to the white house after the failed rally. This led to the very famous shot of a defeated Trump walking across the presidential lawn doing the walk of shame:
Of course, with an infinite appetite for revenge, Trump vowed to take down TikTok by signing a presidential order to have the platform banned in the US. This led to several legal complications as judges blocked the order. Still, Trump was determined to see the platform banned from the country after the Tulsa rally incident.
Fast forward all these years later and we’ve seen reports of TikTok trying to smooth relationships over with Trump following Democrats trying to ban TikTok. The fact that Democrats were for the TikTok ban might have played a role in Trump being against it (“if he’s for’n it, I’ma gainst’n it!”). The possible TikTok bribes probably helped things along. Still, whatever TikTok did, it seems to be working since Trump is trying to reverse the efforts to ban the platform.
So now, you have this kind of weird turn of events where Trump, who has long been at war with free speech, might be doing something to protect it. It’s… weird to say the least. Still, we are entering into a period of complete uncertainty where pretty much anything can happen, so I suppose unpredictability will also play a role in what happens politically in the US moving forward.
