A federal judge today gave the Trump administration until Friday to either defend its planned ban of short-form-video app TikTok in court or hold off on it, adding one more wrinkle to the seemingly endless on-again, off-again saga.
If the government doesn't voluntarily postpone the planned TikTok ban by 2:30pm (EDT) on Friday, then it will have to show up for a hearing on Sunday morning, where he will rule on TikTok's request for an injunction on the ban, Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for DC said today.
Nichols said that the ban, if it takes effect, could prevent potentially hundreds of thousands of new users per day from signing up for TikTok. "I don't think [a ban] merely preserves the status quo," he said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning TikTok and another China-based app, WeChat, on August 6. The executive orders declared the apps to be a "national emergency," but they did not specify what would be banned or how. TikTok filed suit against the administration within a week, arguing the proposed ban was both unconstitutional and politically driven.
TikTok filed its request for an injunction on the ban (PDF) on September 18, the day the administration finally made clear what a ban would actually involve. That injunction is what Nichols will rule on this Sunday, unless the administration agrees to postpone the ban.
The administration's ban on TikTok was initially scheduled to go into effect at 11:59pm on Sunday, September 20. On Saturday evening, the Department of Commerce extended that deadline by one week to Sunday, September 27, after President Trump gave his conditional "blessing" to a deal between TikTok and Oracle.
The fate of that transaction, however, is anything but certain. Not only do Oracle and TikTokRead More – Source
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