U.S. To Bar Downloads Of TikTok, WeChat
Citing national security concerns, the U.S. government said it will bar downloads in the U.S. of the Chinese-owned TikTok and WeChat apps starting Sunday.
In its announcement Friday, the Commerce Department accused China's communist leaders of having shown "the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the U.S.,"
As of Sunday, no mobile app store in the U.S. will be allowed to distribute or maintain the wildly popular video-sharing app TikTok and WeChat, the government says. The federal action will also limit the use of WeChat for transferring money or conducting payments inside the U.S.
Also on Sunday, it will become illegal to provide Internet hosting and other network services for WeChat. The same prohibitions will apply to TikTok, but not until Nov. 12, the Commerce Department said.
"The President has provided until November 12 for the national security concerns posed by TikTok to be resolved. If they are, the prohibitions in this order may be lifted," the agency said.
The short-video app TikTok is owned by ByteDance. WeChat, a messaging and social media app that also lets users conduct payments, is owned by Tencent Holdings Ltd. Both of the apps have hundreds of millions of users, but the U.S. says they're too closely tied to China's government and military.
President Trump has insisted that ByteDance must lose its majority stake in TikTok, triggering a flurry of activity from U.S. companies interested in acquiring or partnering with the video-sharing service. Oracle beat out Microsoft as the top U.S. suitor, but the database and cloud storage company says it would stop short of owning TikTok outright. On Wednesday, Trump rejected the idea of ByteDance retaining a majority position, saying, "I'm not going to be happy with that."
As WeChat's use has spread, it became a popular way for Chinese Americans to connect with people and communities in China. But as NPR's Emily Feng reported last month, "Researchers say its use abroad has extended the global reach of China's surveillance and censorship methods."
The restrictions come a month after Trump signed executive orders regarding both TikTok and WeChat, in which he said the apps could leave huge amounts of users' data vulnerable to misuse by the Chinese Communist Party.
Those orders set off grave concerns among the apps' users, as well as the companies' employees in the U.S., that TikTok and WeChat would be summarily cut off from operating in the U.S.
The orders also gave the Commerce Department 45 days to identify actions to protect U.S. national security and data privacy. Formal notice of the prohibitions will be posted in the Federal Register on Friday, the Commerce Department said. [Copyright 2020 NPR]
