He also cites the perceived role that these applications play in the Chinese government’s censorship of content it deems undesirable and in Chinese disinformation campaigns. In the preambles to the EOs, the President asserts that these apps present national security and foreign policy threats to the United States because they automatically capture-and may allow the Chinese government to access-vast swaths of personal and proprietary information of Americans and Chinese dissidents visiting the United States (the latter only in the case of WeChat). (Tencent), is a messaging, social media and electronic payment application that the WeChat EO states has over one billion users in the United States and worldwide. (ByteDance), is a video-sharing mobile application that, according to the TikTok EO, has been downloaded over 175 million times in the United States and over one billion times globally. Despite some uncertainty over how exactly the Commerce Secretary will implement these EOs, we can now highlight certain key aspects. 1 Importantly, the EOs do not have immediate effect rather, 45 days from the date the EOs were issued (on September 20, 2020), the Commerce Secretary is authorized to identify transactions that will be subject to prohibitions.īut the extraordinary breadth and ambiguity of the EOs have left US companies and many others looking to the Trump Administration for additional clarity on how the EOs will be implemented, with much of the focus on whether the WeChat EO sweeps in transactions with WeChat’s parent, Tencent Holdings, and the types of transactions that will be subject to the prohibitions. These EOs arrive in the wake of the review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States of a past acquisition by TikTok’s parent, ByteDance Ltd., as well as President Trump’s repeated threats against TikTok as Microsoft considers acquiring the company. ![]() On August 6, 2020, President Trump issued two nearly parallel executive orders (EOs) targeting the enormously popular apps TikTok and WeChat: Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok ( TikTok EO), and Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by WeChat ( WeChat EO).
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