Trump has postponed the TikTok ban. Was that legal?

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday, his first day back in office, signed an executive order postponing the country's ban of TikTok for 75 days. But whether this move was lawful is up in the air.

The ban — signed into law by the Biden administration and upheld by the Supreme Court — gave the Chinese parent company ByteDance until Sunday to sell its stake in the popular social media platform or have it outlawed in the U.S. 

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had alleged TikTok could be used by the Chinese government to spy on U.S. citizens. 

But there are few signs Trump had the power to override the law. 

"Executive orders cannot override existing laws," said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University's Tech Policy Institute. 

The law has a provision that allows a 90-day extension if there has been progress toward a sale before its effective date. The app went dark in the U.S. on Saturday evening, but was restored the next day, with a message to U.S. users that the company was working with the Trump administration to find a solution. 

Kreps says it's even less certain that that provision can be applied retroactively, given that the law was already in effect when Trump signed his order. 

"It's not clear that the new president has that authority to issue the 90-day extension of a law that's already gone into effect," she said. 

She also doubts the conditions for a delay exist at this point — without so much as even a potential buyer being named to prove that a sale was moving along. Various media reports have mused about whether Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk would buy the platform, or if Mark Zuckerberg's Meta would be interested. 

Trump, who had earlier opposed TikTok's presence in the U.S., told reporters he changed his mind once he used the app himself. 

TikTok has meanwhile continued to operate as usual in Canada and elsewhere.

The Supreme Court approached the TikTok ban as a First Amendment issue, and whether the law violated TikTok's or its users' right to freedom of expression, says Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University. 

The court "doesn't judge the merits of the law. It doesn't judge the timeline of the law. It simply says, did Congress have the power to pass this law?" he told CBC News. 

Ultimately, it deemed the law constitutional, citing Congress's concerns with the app's data collection.