US President Donald Trump announced Thursday two executive orders that will prohibit any transactions with TikTok operator ByteDance as well as WeChat owner Tencent, as tensions between the US and China continue to escalate. The orders will take effect in 45 days.
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According to Trump, Chinese mobile apps are threatening “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
In the executive orders, the president said that both WeChat and TikTok capture “vast swaths of information” from their users. TikTok, with over 175 million downloads in the US and over 1 billion globally, collect information such as location data and browsing and search histories.
Trump also noted that the apps censor content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive.
“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information – potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” the US president said in one of the orders.
Earlier this month, he also threatened to ban the video-sharing app over concerns that it’s being used to collect Americans’ personal data. TikTok has already been banned in India since June.
See: Timeline: How TikTok reached global fame and now faces a US ban
Responding to the executive order, TikTok said it was “shocked,” as the order “was issued without any due process.”
The company emphasized that it has been engaging with the US government for nearly a year to address the latter’s concerns. “What we encountered instead was that the Administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses,” it said.
TikTok also reiterated that it never shares user data with the Chinese government nor censors content at its request. “We even expressed our willingness to pursue a full sale of the US business to an American company,” the company said.
Trump’s decision comes as tech giant Microsoft is pursuing talks about a potential takeover of TikTok, which is estimated to be valued at US$50 billion. The company aims to complete the discussions by September 15.
Tencent, meanwhile, said it’s “reviewing the executive order to get a full understanding.”
The WeChat operator saw its market value shed about US$35 billion as its stock plunged by as much as 10% on Friday following Trump’s order.
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