In a new executive order signed by Donald Trump on Thursday, he announced to ban all transactions towards Tencent and ByteDance starting 45 days from now. The order is claimed for protecting the national ICT and services supply chain, by banning transactions made through TikTok and WeChat primarily, as they’re mentioned to be collecting a large amount of data.
The US Bans Transactions to ByteDance and Tencent
Making the arguments more deep between the US and China, the US President, Donald Trump has yesterday sighed a new executive order, which intends to ban transactions to Chinese companies – ByteDance and Tencent. More specifically, he mentioned the apps to be TikTok (owned by ByteDance) and WeChat (owned by Tencent), as they’re capturing sensitive data.
The data herein is the “personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States, thereby allowing the Chinese Communist Party a mechanism for keeping tabs on Chinese citizens“.
He explained this with an example of a report from a researcher who discovered a database which contained billions of messages of not just Chinese, but also Americans and other nationalities.
Further, he accused these services to be censoring content as per the benefit of the Chinese government. Thus, encouraging him to ban transactions as a phase of banning those giant apps from the US. These would trigger the owners, ByteDance, and Tencent to challenge in court, as they’re several businesses in the US.
For example, Tencent is having stakes in all major US gaming companies like Epic Games and Riot Games. Also companies like Snapchat’s parent company, and even produced few films under the name of Tencent Films.
The transactions ban was scheduled to take place from 45 days of signing the order, thus starting from September 20. Whereas Microsoft reported being concluding buying TikTok US wing by September 15th.
