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bearcobra | on: TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users
Despite my own feelings on the ban, this kind of royal court politics is the worst potential outcome. Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority, signed into law by the president and ruled on by the supreme courts feels like the start of a very dangerous path. Not to mention the prosecutorial discretion may be creating massive liability that the new administration could use to extract favors from some of our largest tech companies.
slg | parent | next
>Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority, signed into law by the president and ruled on by the supreme courts feels like the start of a very dangerous path

I don't understand why this is not the primary takeaway. Regardless of the specifics of this issue, it is objectively a huge power grab for a president to vow to not enforce a law that had bipartisan approval of both the legislative and judiciary branches.

nordsieck | root | parent | next
> Regardless of the specifics of this issue, it is objectively a huge power grab for a president to vow to not enforce a law that had bipartisan approval of both the legislative and judiciary branches.

Isn't that the road we've been walking down for a while now with the proliferation of executive orders?

I'm not a fan of this outcome either, but it doesn't strike me as a revolutionary departure from current norms.

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Jare | parent | next
> Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority, signed into law by the president and ruled on by the supreme courts feels like the start of a very dangerous path

The very dangerous path started a long time ago, or at least that's how it feels from abroad. "He can't" followed by "He wouldn't" then "He did".

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maeil | parent | next
> feels like the start of a very dangerous path.

I'm baffled people keep saying this. You're miles down the dangerous path - you've almost reached the end of it. This is nothing new.

mullingitover | parent | next
> Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority

It was a rider tacked onto a must-pass bill. There’s nothing about the manner it was passed that makes it special or particularly blessed. This was classic congressional sausage-making.

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intended | parent | next
>feels like the start of a very dangerous path

Start?

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konschubert | parent | next
That’s how all dictatorships work.

Everything is illegal.

You live by the KING.

hot_gril | parent | next
The actual bad precedent set here is that the US executive branch has the authority to censor the media.
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warner25 | parent | next
Yes, and what's even worse to me is Trump's explicit motivation for supporting TikTok now. Like there are some interesting philosophical, moral, and maybe legal arguments against the TikTok ban but what he's seized on is simply that TikTok was a useful tool (as far as he's been told) for gaining votes. Keeping it around just benefits him politically and personally, so that's it.
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maxerickson | parent | next
Mechanistically, the law applies to the app, not the service. It's not clear to me that serving videos to users that already have the app is a violation of the law.
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jameshart | parent | next
We are watching the norm be created that ‘what apps we are allowed to use’ is something that is in the personal gift of Donald Trump.

That is a very weird precedent for us to be setting.

encoderer | parent | next
The law specifically gives the president a 90 day extension.
sanderjd | parent | next
The executive order will just be baldly illegal, and what happens in the litigation on it is the next battle.

TikTok is, as we speak, breaking US law.

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Zak | parent | next
I won't argue against the idea that Trump is on a dangerous political path based around patronage and personal favors, but the law does grant him the authority to give TikTok a 90 day extension. If TikTok has not sold by then and he fails to enforce the law, that's a bigger problem.
tzs | parent | next
> Disregarding a law that was passed by a bipartisan majority

I wonder if there was actually a bipartisan majority in favor of getting rid of TikTok?

Yes, the bill passed by a bipartisan majority, but TikTok was not the only thing in that bill. Previous attempts to advance a standalone TikTok bill had failed to get majority support.

This time it got attached to a bill that provided $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, $26 billion in aid for Israel, and $1 billion of additional humanitarian assistance for food, medical supplies, and clean water for Gaza. There was also $8 billion for security in Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific.

A lot of Congress considered that aid (or parts of it) to be critical, and it had taken a lot of time to get there. I bet as a result of that a lot of Congress members would vote "yes" even if they disagreed with the TikTok part.

When Biden signed it he spoke about the importance of all the aid provisions and didn't mention TikTok at all.

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tim333 | parent | next
Only four more years of this stuff to go. In other news Trump coin has plummeted by a few billion as Melania launched her own meme coin with a ~4bn market cap.
ikiris | parent
How do you figure? The explicit domain of enforcement is the executive branch, so if the new guy coming in says something akin to "They've made their decision, let them enforce it" that's somewhat by design even if you may not agree with it.

The system was designed with these checks and balances in mind explicitly.

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