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TikTok is coming back online after US President-elect Donald Trump pledged to restore it
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- Title
- TikTok is now banned in America. It might not last long | CNN Business
- Published
- Jan 19 2025
Well this is suspicious to say the least. Iv not been paying attention to this whole debacle but something feels weird about it.
It feels really really weird.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. I told my friends months ago that the main thing trump was signaling was that he was for sale. Unless you're suspicious of what the hell that sale was, but likely just piles of money and some assurances that no one has any intention of keeping.
I wonder how the Republican congresspeople feel about this. It seems clear that Trump is blatantly violating the part of the law that requires evidence of a sale well underway for a delay of the ban to be allowed.
Maybe this was the plan all along - let Biden get the flack for the ban so Trump can come in and save the day.
I don't know that the GOP will care he's violated the rule of law.... I'm worried that others won't care either.
As far as I’ve seen, the support and opposition for the ban has little to no correlation to normal political affiliations.
It may be downright more popular that he ignores the law than if he enforced it.
I'm not dumb enough to think it's a good idea to let him just ignore (more) laws. The amount of people sucking up to him, including Newsom and Snoop Dogg is stomach turning.
I just have a bad feeling about it. And I didn't think it should have been banned.
I guess when a Republican president is in office with a Republican-majority House and Senate, lobbying and ass-kissing becomes a requirement to make federal-level changes.
Not that lobbying goes away when that's not the case. "Lobbying" is probably one of my least favorite words.
IMO, what we're seeing is a divergence between the electorate and the public at large. Perhaps even a divergence between those who vote every election and those who only vote every 4 years. Congress may have consensus to ban TikTok, but the public is, at best, divided. It's an easy disconnect for a populist to exploit.
Still, ignoring laws calling for a ban is the less-harmful end of a slippery slope. Executive orders or selectively enforcing laws that many prior administrations have ignored are the true dangers.
I don't think "the electorate" and the public vary that much. I think people are voting - like many decisions - more emotionally and "vibes" based than factually. I doubt that everyone that vote for Tom Cotton is a raging racist, and we know the House is mostly a re-election game. It's still easily exploitable, but I don't think the voters gave a mandate to ban Tiktok, because the voters were never consulted or informed. (Repeat with Congress banning its own members from using the bathrooms.)
"Ignoring" this law would be an executive order situation and it would be a "the president doesn't have to follow the law" situation which is why I think it's particularly bad.
Did you see this comment from @stu2b50? If you look at the PDF with the survey results, there aren't a huge number of independents who they queried, but if you go through the results, it does a good job of demonstrating that the difference between Ds and Rs is largely how they interpret things, whereas independents are largely just uninformed/apathetic. They mostly responded that they didn't know what was going on and then a supermajority said they didn't vote.
I think this is a good demonstration that there is a gulf between the electorate and the public at large. But the results seem to indicate that independents mostly agree with Democrats if they are paying attention. So there's a gap—and a logical one—but it's not necessarily where people might expect it to be when you frame the question in a specific way that implies a difference in policy preferences.
That is fair, I think specifically I was intending that an individual being voted for doesn't actually mean the electorate as a whole supports everything they do, which is how I took the comment I was replying to, I think.
I'm admittedly quite tired
I don't think this holds water.... people widely voted for Trump and a conservative, Republican government. There might be an argument that those people don't necessarily reflect the wishes of their voters, but I would be really hesitant to call voters ignorant.
I disagree that a simple majority equals “widely voted.” It wasn’t something like 55%—even if it was, it was geographically unequal. It was not a consensus of the people, merely the rules stating someone must win and someone winning.
I’m all for calling the voters ignorant. The popularity gulf between Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act shows that most people are unconcerned with specific policy when it conflicts with groupthink.
It was 49.9%, for reference.
Best way for any one left of center to continue to lose elections is to act as if or call their voters idiots. And elections and the frameworks we have for governing are the closest thing we have to a consensus.
Despite being American, Brexit was the event that heavily soured me on simple majorities being sufficient for issues requiring broad national consensus. I have no opinion on whether remain or leave was correct—as noted above, not British. However, it was a procedural wreck from start to finish. Making a generation-defining change like that should require 55+% or simple majorities in three consecutive referenda, not a one-and-done 52%.
The presidency (& congressional elections), of course, do need to have a winner—there is no status quo to default back to if no candidate reaches consensus popularity.
Oh, you and I were talking different conversations about calling the voters morons. You're correct that it's a losing strategy to tell them that as part of the
propagandacampaign.There's a difference with Brexit. Brexit was a consensus that the current situation sucked... but there wasn't a real plan that everyone agreed on.
There's mechanisms in congress to prevent radical changes and ensuring that there is some level of agreement - multiple branches of government, separate house and senate with different election rules, and the dreaded senate filibuster - all of which tend to push in favor of the status quo.
Maybe it's splitting hair, but I think it's also dangerous to believe that voters are idiots - same as believing that Trump is dumb - it leads to bad assumptions about how people act and behave - and leads to poor political maneuver.
Considering the amount of congratulating I'm seeing from the right on social media, I'm assuming they're cool with it. Laws don't apply when it benefits their own.
There has been some pushback from a couple of Republican senators today.
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/19/24347280/tiktok-ban-shutdown-ends
As the chair of the Intelligence Committee, Tom Cotton was the one who got the ball rolling on this in the first place.
Curious what laws Trump is violating here (Here specifically, a full list would be over character limit). The text of the law just ends with "Upon certain certifications, the President may extend the deadlines by up to 90 days one time." with no stated definition of "certain certifications."
But, I would at least argue that one cannot "Extend" a deadline that has already passed...
Text from here. This 90 day exemption has not satisfied any of the 3 conditions, let alone all, so Trump is just pulling this extension out of his ass. Congress needs to assert their power here.
Also, it doesn't seem like Trump is even going to pretend to certify to Congress. He's just going to sign an executive order.
They probably don't care enough to contradict Trump on it.
I see this as yet another example of US Presidents looking for creative workarounds for US laws they don't like, often using executive orders. This is a bipartisan trend. It's sometimes understandable when something important is at stake, because Congress is somewhat dysfunctional. Usually this is before the Supreme Court rules on it, though?
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to go to such extremes for an entertainment app. There are competing apps that people could use.
I was happy that TikTok (or perhaps its service provider Oracle, which seems to calling the shots here?) was holding out for doing things legally. But maybe instead we get a muddy workaround until a new law is passed?
I suppose there are lots of unenforced laws on the books.
I don’t see why apple would take the risk of keeping the app listed while it’s a violation of federal law that would just give trump leverage if he wants anything
I would hate to be involved in those strategy meetings at Apple or Google. It's not a good situation to be in.
Probably worse at Google since they just lost a federal antitrust case and Now a dude who said some of the most unhinged shit of your company is effectively in charge of the DOJ
The other side is that Trump goes "These BIG TECH TRAITORS think they’re bigger than ME, the PRESIDENT! But let me tell you, NOBODY has more power than me. I DECIDE who this law applies to! We need to BREAK THEM UP, folks, so that AMERICANS can finally be FREE from their horrible, biased CENSORSHIP. Believe me, it’s going to be the greatest freedom you've ever seen" and that's a whole 'nother can of worms. There's reason all of them already paid $1 million to his inauguration fund.
Yeah but he would not have the power to do anything legally which he would if they keep it up.
Not that I don’t believe he would just plain break the law but I just have a hard time seeing corporate lawyers tell Tim Apple that it would be fine to just ignore federal law that the supreme courts just upheld as legal.
Trump doesn't want to piss Tiktok off if he can pressure it into supporting him; it's classic control the media stuff. Tiktok is very blatantly kissing the ring here, the CEO has explicitly namedropped Trump in their direct statement to the userbase.
Related reading - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonacquiescence
It's not… unheard of. Basically the executive, unless at risk of getting impeached, can just choose to not comply with a court ruling.
Yeah it's that "constitutional crisis" part that's a concern.
I’m confused ngl
And politics.