How Trump’s war against TikTok and WeChat is progressing

27 September 20204 years ago babelfish

All of Trump's latest moves against TikTok and WeChat

Trump's war continues on TikTok, daughter of ByteDance, and WeChat. The American president wanted them out of the digital smartphone application stores on September 20. Things don't go quite as planned, but the Tycoon doesn't give up.

Let's go step by step.

WHAT HAD TO HAPPEN

Let's start with what had to happen. As of September 20, downloads of the TikTok social platform and WeChat messaging app should have been banned in the United States. As explained in this Start Magazine article, the Commerce Department stated that the president had allowed until November 12 for problems related to national security to be resolved and, if so, the ban could be lifted.

WHAT IS ACCEPTED WITH WECHAT

Neither platform was banned, for different reasons. WeChat requested and obtained an injunction from San Francisco judge Laurel Beeler on Saturday 19 September. The app therefore remained visible and downloadable on the stores.

WHAT THE US GOVERNMENT IS ASKING FOR

But Trump does not give up and last Friday the US Department of Justice asked Judge Beeler to allow the removal of WeChat because the app represents a "threat to national security".

"The court's preliminary injunction permits the unrestricted use of WeChat, an application that the Executive has determined to pose a threat to US national security and foreign policy," the lawyers' request to the court wrote. according to Bloomberg reports. Washington believes the app allows Beijing to "monitor the American people, and to collect and use vast amounts of American users' personal information to further their interests."

WHAT BYTEDANCE ASKS

Even ByteDance's TikTok is still on the stores, because the Department of Commerce has postponed the possible ban to September 27, after the Chinese social network has reached an agreement with Oracle and Walmart for the creation of TikTok Global, which would allow companies Americans to manage US user data.

The agreement is pending approval and in the meantime ByteDance has turned to a US court asking for a preliminary injunction, like the one obtained by We Chat.

The restrictions "are not motivated by a genuine concern about national security, but rather by political considerations relating to the upcoming general elections," the lawyers of ByteDance write in the memorandum attached to the request for injunction. If the ban goes into effect, "hundreds of millions of Americans who have not yet downloaded TikTok would be excluded from this large and diverse online community – six weeks before national elections."

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/come-procede-la-guerra-di-trump-contro-tiktok-e-wechat/ on Sun, 27 Sep 2020 06:09:46 +0000.