TIK TOK

Time - President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that he “most likely” would give TikTok 90 more days to work out a deal that would allow the popular video-sharing platform to avoid a U.S. ban...

Under the law passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden last year, TikTok’s China-based parent company had nine months to sell the platform’s U.S. operation to an approved buyer. The law allows the sitting president to grant an extension if a sale is in progress.

“I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at. The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone interview. "We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation.

“If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday,” he said.

Both White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made clear Friday that the Biden administration would leave the law’s implementation to Trump given that his inauguration falls the day after the ban takes effect.

New Republic - As the Supreme Court unanimously voted to uphold the government’s impending ban on TikTok, Justice Neil Gorsuch made an interesting observation in his concurring opinion.

“Whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends, I do not know. A determined foreign adversary may just seek to replace one lost surveillance application with another. As time passes and threats evolve, less dramatic and more effective solutions may emerge. Even what might happen next to TikTok remains unclear,” Gorsuch wrote, but he then added a caveat.

“But the question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality. Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional,” Gorsuch continued.

The Guardian - TikTok says it “will be forced to go dark on January 19” in the United States unless the Biden administration assures service providers that it will not enforce a law banning the Chinese-owned social media app that was upheld by the US supreme court on Friday.The nine justices voted unanimously in a decision that sides with the majority of the US Congress and the US Department of Justice that the hugely popular social media app is a threat to US national security.