The TikTok Ban’s Third Snooze Button Proves It Was Always Bullshit
from the we-can-just-ignore-laws-now? dept
Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that “emergency” keeps getting 75-day extensions.
Trump is reportedly about to hit the snooze button on TikTok enforcement for the third time, extending a deadline that was supposedly so urgent that Congress had to rush through legislation ignoring basic First Amendment protections. This will be the third extension since January — which should tell you everything about how “urgent” this national security threat actually was.
With a mid-June deadline approaching and trade talks with China in limbo, Trump is expected to sign an executive order staving off enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app, according to people familiar with his plan.
It would be the third extension since Trump took office in January. The current one expires June 19.
The pattern here is obvious: Biden championed the ban, then refused to enforce it on his way out the door. Trump promised to fix everything with a deal in 75 days, then extended that deadline when China predictably balked. Now he’s extending it again, treating federal law like a negotiating chip he can deploy when convenient.
Want proof this was never really about national security? When Trump spoke with Xi Jinping this week about trade — you know, the perfect opportunity to address this supposed existential threat — TikTok didn’t even come up.
Trump spoke by phone on Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping amid a breakdown in trade negotiations. The two leaders agreed that their teams would hold a new round of trade talks soon. The Chinese team is led by Vice Premier He Lifeng. The U.S. would be represented by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Trump said.
TikTok didn’t come up on the call Thursday, according to a Trump administration official.
If TikTok really posed the kind of national security risk that justified circumventing the First Amendment (which the Supreme Court said was only justified based on the supposed severity of the threat), wouldn’t it be a priority in direct talks with the Chinese president? Instead, it’s apparently not worth mentioning.
But, also, even if the entire law weren’t a moral panic smokescreen, we have a more fundamental problem: in a country where the rule of law is functioning, presidents don’t get to selectively ignore federal laws via executive order. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to work. But Trump is doing exactly that — and worse, he’s using the threat of future enforcement as leverage to engineer his preferred outcome.
I know that Trump is making a mockery of the Constitution in so many different ways right now, but it doesn’t mean that this particular attack on it should be ignored.
The TikTok saga has become a perfect case study in how moral panics work: manufacture urgency, rush through bad legislation, then quietly let it fade when the political winds shift. The only difference here is that the law is still on the books, being wielded like a sword of Damocles over a platform that hosts American speech.
We called this nonsense from the beginning, and every snooze button press proves us right. The real threat to American democracy isn’t kids posting dance videos — it’s politicians who treat the rule of law like a game show where they get to pick which laws to enforce based on what plays well on any given day.
Filed Under: donald trump, enforcement, moral panic, tiktok ban
Companies: tiktok
Comments on “The TikTok Ban’s Third Snooze Button Proves It Was Always Bullshit”
Everything is a Reichstag fire when you’re a fascist looking to justify your violence, violations, and seizure of more power.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.
I mean… no? This entire administration has been about blowing off important things, including national security. You can’t use the administrations actions as proof of importance when it’s fundamentally incompetent and unserious. Case in point:
By this logic, if selectively ignoring the rule of law was a serious and dire threat, wouldn’t someone have done something about it? What about detaining/deporting people without due process for over a month? USAid? etc, etc. The reality is those are very important, and still getting blown off.
Like…. Guys, I think the administration who put a 22 year old intern in charge of terrorism prevention may not actually care much about national security. It’s not because terrorism prevention isn’t important.
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Well yeah, it’s because the supposedly important, dangerous, and even terroristic things they bray about are completely made-up. It’s much easier to paly around with and ignore when convenient the imaginary things.
Not that they aren’t incompetent when it comes to real problems, nor that they aren’t frighteningly efficient at wildly prosecuting other made-up things.
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That’s the thing though, they play around/ignore just as much with real things. We have a news host running DoD right now, a national security advisor using a backdoored version of Signal, a president who gets his briefings from Fox, the FBI’s deputy director complaining the job is boring, etc.
It’s not just that they’re incompetent at real problems, they’re so incompetent they will happily break real things just as easily as if they’re imaginary. They don’t give a fuck about any of it, none of it is real to them.
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Yes.
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It’s all bullshit because America elected a bullshitter. Trump is not some science-fiction robot whose head will explode if an inconsistency is pointed out. Neither logic, facts, nor history matter to the president, and there’s good evidence that most of the people who voted for Trump don’t care either.
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People are doing lots of things about it, and have been all along. The courts are quite busy.
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The specific example I’m referencing here is the delay on enforcing the TikTok law (it has no mechanism for these delays- they are illegal). People are not in fact doing lots of things about it. Very few people seem to care, despite the fact that it’s straight up violating the law.
That said, speaking a bit more generally, we’ve seen a wide range of reactions. The courts have acted on some issues, they’ve half-assed others (via selective delays with stays, etc), and others haven’t really been dealt with. It is both true that the courts are busy, and also there are many things that have completely neglected/normalized (the most obvious examples off the top of my head being Hatch Act violations, or Presidential Records Act).
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The sentence was “if selectively ignoring the rule of law was a serious and dire threat, wouldn’t someone have done something about it?”, where “it” seems to refer to “selectively ignoring the rule of law” (in general).
Anyway, Trump had previously tried to ban TikTok via executive order, and was sued—basically for “selectively ignoring the rule of law”. Then a specific law was passed to ban TikTok, and that did go to the courts. And then Trump decided not to enforce the law.
You’re right that a refusal to enforce is illegal (the President has a duty to enforce laws—excepting, per oath, those that are unconstitutional, which SCOTUS have already ruled isn’t a problem here). But I’m not sure the courts can intervene if nobody sues, and I’m not aware of anyone suing over the delays. Who would want to do that, anyway? I guess maybe TikTok, so the President can stop using delays to illegally jerk them around; but, for obvious reasons, that’s not appealing.
It will be brought back up when Trump needs another distraction.
fines
I think a lot about the proposed TikTok fines Apple and Google face for hosting TikTok. What’s the total now? Multiple billions I think..
In big tech stuff we usually see piddly fines that don’t change behavior (it takes mere days for Big Tech to make enough money to pay the previous years fines..) then in this one case they had the fines large enough that Apple and Google had to pay attention then they never enforced the fines anyhow (whether good or bad to enforce).
I don’t know why this fine model isn’t used for something like privacy stuff where all companies just steamroll past them as a cost of doing business not think to avoid (including digital health companies we study).
Just a thought
one of the original comments
Was that China Owne dthe company.
Is that Worse then the USA gov. Jumping in to Save Banks, Air services and a few other things in our nation?
How many Billions has that cost the USA?
'This law is vital to protect the american public! ... eventually.'
Nothing says ‘This was a PR stunt to pander to racists from the outset’ quite like yet another extension to allow an app that was described as a fatal threat to the american public to continue to run in the US, and act that by the regime’s own argument is putting americans in grave danger.
Emergencies
The tariff threats are also based on an “emergency”, and there have been other historical examples. The obvious lesson is that “emergency” doesn’t mean shit, unless the law gives a specific definition.
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TBF, that’s also just blatantly illegal. The law does actually give definitions that are being violated/ignored, it’s just not being enforced.
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Are you sure? I looked up the IEEPA and see, as the first part:
“(a) Any authority granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may be exercised to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.”
Unless terms such as “unusual” or “threat” have defined legal meanings that I’m not seeing, it seems to be pretty clearly delegating unchecked authority to the President to decide. The actions of other countries definitely do affect the economy of the United States, negative effects could reasonably be called a “threat”, and “unusual” seems entirely subjective.
By contrast, some “emergency” deportations were definitely illegal. Most obviously, very young children were deported, under an act that has a much higher minimum age.
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We have yet to see anything whatsoever emerge, so even by the loosey-est and and goosey-est of definitions, they are in violation.
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Can you be more specific?
Let’s say, as an example, a President said that:
– China is selling and shipping products to U.S. persons at unreasonably low prices
– it’s “unusual”, because for 90% of the U.S.A.’s history, nothing much like this was happening
– it’s a threat to U.S. manufacturers, and thus the economy
– it’s coming, in large part, from outside the U.S. (obviously)
– it’s an emergency
– so let’s add huge tariffs
What part of the law would this be violating? I don’t see anything crazy there, and the only parts that seems remotely “loosey-goosey” are the declaration of emergency, and the tariffs being huge—but that’s all a matter of opinion.
I think Americans should just admit to their mistake here: they let too much power become concentrated in the hands of one person. Through laws, but also through public discourse and such (the title “President” was deliberately humble, the literal meaning being one who sits before a group of people, such as to guide them—yet the people talk a lot about the president, while mostly ignoring the stuff they’re meant to preside over). This being despite ample warning from the country’s founders.
It’s a problem that needs to be fixed. But how many Americans have actually ever written to any representative, to suggest that a proposed or existing law be changed such that a committee (for example, and maybe including members of all government branches) would decide instead of a single person?
TACO
Trump Always Chickens Out.
Re: Suggested edit
Tik-Taco. : )
Shame Biden insisted on it instead of letting it go
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Yeap. Another dork. Nowhere near as awful, yet the suckage was there.
Sooo has any democrat representative, either ones who voted for the ban or otherwise said anything about Trump continually prolonging the deadline? I ask because it feels like the world has quietly at large all admitted the ban was problematic and suddenly not something that should’ve been done yesterday anymore.
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Have you been in a coma the past several months? The BBC’s World Service has been saying that Trump’s policies are problematic from the get-go of each one.
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They asked about Democrats in the House.