Donald Trump Signs Executive Order Banning TikTok and WeChat

After a little back and forth between TikTok and Trump, the future of ByteDance‘s viral TikTok app was up in the air as of early this week. That uncertainty has now been resolved in favor of Donald Trump as he has just placed an executive order banning all transactions from the app.

Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act, the executive order goes on to state that “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China…continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application, in particular, TikTok.”

WeChat (owned by China’s Tencent) was also included in the executive order for the banning of transactions. The banning of WeChat will most likely not affect Americans too much as the app has been slow in adoption, but the same can’t be said about the staggering 80 million U.S. monthly TikTok users. ByteDance argues that it has made efforts in making the company less associated with China, employing staff from all over the world, and even storing its data outside of the mainland but still can’t shake its ties with the People’s Republic of China.

The last hope now for U.S. TikTok users is for Microsoft to finalize its acquisition for the app and hopefully make the changes necessary in order to address the national security concerns. As of now, TikTok/WeChat users have just 45 days left to make use of the app.

INBOX: @realDonaldTrump has signed an executive order to ban TikTok in 45 days. pic.twitter.com/1zR4HgCPVj

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) August 7, 2020

In other tech news, Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2020 introduces five new devices.