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Comment by apawloski | Hacker News Reader

I am still baffled, because wasn't there a bipartisan law passed banning TikTok? Is that just being ignored while a deal is orchestrated to sell it to Larry Ellison (and install Barron Trump on the TikTok Board of Directors)? The enforcement of the law is confusing to me here.

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You're not wrong. It was very clearly illegal for TikTok to maintain operations in the US since the law started applying, and yet the US government ordered everyone to disregard the law and they just went along with it.

This is another sign of the US' decline. The refusal to follow inconvenient laws.

Technically, the law did allow the president to approve a one-time extension if there was a deal under negotiation. But every subsequent extension (I think we’re on number 3 or 4 now) had no legal basis in the text of the legislation and both Apple and Google are clearly in violation of the law for not banning it from their app stores after the 1st extension

This is a bug in the system that should be corrected. The fourteenth amendment guarantees everyone equal protection under the law.

Allowing the executive branch sway over the enforcement of laws that they're ostensibly beholden to prevents enforcement at all, which robs the citizens of the United States of the protection they've been afforded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...

Why doesn't Facebook sue if this is the case? Get TikTok taken down and leave Instagram as the only alternative.

Your president can disregard laws to favour outcomes he prefers. How do you not see that if the president can willfully ignore laws, you have no justice at all anymore?

Even this is too charitable. A short timeline of January 2025 would be something like this:

- Jan 16: The Supreme Court issues its opinion, upholding the legality of the TikTok ban. The Biden administration declines to enforce it, preferring to let the incoming Trump administration handle the matter.

- Jan 18: TikTok voluntarily turns off its services. Google and Apple remove the app from their respective app stores. Trump declares on social media that he will sign an executive order "to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect".

- Jan 19: TikTok restores it service after being assured by the incoming Trump administration that TikTok would not face penalties.

- Jan 20: The Trump administration signs the aforementioned executive order.

However, Trump's executive order was untimely (the law already should have gone into effect), and at any rate it's dubious that the executive order would've been legal regardless. The TikTok ban (PAFACA) had a specific provision for when an extension could be granted. From Wikipedia:

> The president may grant a one-time extension of the divestiture deadline by as long as 90 days if a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, "significant" progress has been made to executing the divestiture, and legally binding agreements for facilitating the divestiture are in place.

Notably, none of these requirements had been met. There were no identified buyers; there were no binding agreements. The Trump administration's refusal to enforce the TikTok ban might have been the first lawless act of the second administration, and it happened only within hours of Trump being sworn in.

> Is that just being ignored while a deal is orchestrated

Yes. There is a series of executive orders (eg [1]) that literally say "To permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed, the Attorney General shall not take any action on behalf of the United States to enforce the Act ...". The "PROTECTING AMERICANS FROM FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATIONS ACT" only allows the US AG to sue for enforcement, so this essentially is completely waiving enforcement.

This is why congress often gives independent agencies or private actors the right to sue in an act - because the DOJ cannot be trusted to fairly enforce laws if there is even the slightest political or economic valence to them.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/savi...

???

That's dumb.

I mean..

what about ..the slightest political or economic valence to..

um..

the Attorney General?

or even worse..

what about ..the slightest political or economic valence.. to ..independent agencies or private actors.

That's, like, explicit corruption isn't it? We'll give this private actor or independent entity the exclusive right to be the defacto enforcer for whatever laws. (Laws they themselves probably asked, sorry "lobbied", for?)

If you can trust some ..independent.. entity, I'm sorry, that means you can make the cops independent in the same way and trust them to enforce that law. If it's impossible that the cops can be set up to be independent in a way that prevents corruption, then how is the ..independent.. entity set up that it prevents corruption?

I hadn't realized that was going on. That's insanity. Wow we're corrupt.

Quoting TFA: "It’s worth noting that none of this was really legal; the law technically stated that TikTok shouldn’t have been allowed to exist for much of this year. Everyone just looked the other way while Trump and his cronies repeatedly ignored deadlines and hammered away at the transfer."

They I understand it: There was a deal to ban TikTok unless ownership changes --- the original intention was no Chinese involvement, but now it seems "ownership change" means the ownership is amicable to the current president. There was also something of a grace period for when that ban went into effect if TikTok could show they were actively in the process of finding a new owner. The current president basically just kept insisting that grace period was in effect while he constructed a bid for ownership that aligned with his and his friends (business) interests.

Basically, Congress did not do its job and ignored the very law they voted for.

Congress can't really ignore a law though, anymore than I can.

Am I ignoring the TikTok law? No, because it's not my job to enforce it.

The executive branch is the one that ignores the law.

Congress have the power to remove a president.

> Basically, Congress did not do its job and ignored the very law they voted for.

It feels like this is increasingly the case. Not sure what the solutions are.

> and install Barron Trump on the TikTok Board of Directors

Can cronyism become more blatant?

Hunter Biden on the board of Burisma?

If he's found to be guilty then lock him up? I genuinely don't see how this matters?

That's the (obvious, I guess) comparison I was thinking of too, but IIRC correctly the issues there were 1) allegations of bribes (which ended up being false/that witness arrested by the FBI for lying about it) and 2) Biden improperly leveraging the State Dept (which was also found to be untrue by two different Republican Senate investigations).

Now if the issue was Hunter Biden being on the board at all -- even if independent of any Joe Biden dealmaking -- then I'm very curious how the Republicans sounding alarms back then react to the Barron Trump TikTok board seat now.

hey, everybody hates this too. biden isn't the president anymore.

seriously?

did I miss the news that the US government forced a deal that transferred partial ownership of a foreign company to Burisma, and put Hunter on the board?

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