Explainer: Will Trump’s order get rid of TikTok, WeChat from US?
President Donald Trump has ordered a sweeping but unspecified ban on dealings with the Chinese owners of consumer apps TikTok and WeChat, though it remains unclear if he gets the legal authority to really ban the software from the US.
The twin executive orders issued Thursday-one for every single app-take effect in 45 days. They state they are necessary for the reason that China-owned software “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of america,” and call on the Commerce Secretary to define the banned dealings by that point.
The apps can’t be distributed in the US
As the wording of the orders is vague and appears to have been rushed out, some authorities said it appears designed to bar the popular apps from the Apple and Google app stores, that could effectively remove them from distribution in america.
“That is an unprecedented usage of presidential authority,” Eurasia Group analyst Paul Triolo said within an email. At a minimum, he said, the orders may actually “constitute a ban on the ability of US application stores run by Apple and Google to add either mobile software after 45 days.”
Triolo said the orders may face legal challenges and warned that Beijing will probably “react harshly, at least rhetorically.” Trump’s orders cited legal authority from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act.
The action may be the Trump administration’s latest try to hobble China, a rising monetary superpower. Over the past many years, it has waged a trade war with China, blocked mergers involving Chinese companies and stifled the business of Chinese businesses like Huawei, a maker of phones and telecom equipment. China-backed hackers, meanwhile, have been blamed for data breaches folks federal databases and the credit agency Equifax, and the Chinese government strictly limits what US tech companies can do in China.
Election-year politics in the US are fanning the flames, as Trump is apparently using friction with China to drum up voter support.
There have been bipartisan concerns over TikTok
Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers share concerns about TikTok running from its vulnerability to censorship and misinformation campaigns to the safety of user data and children’s privacy. However the administration has provided no specific evidence that TikTok has made US users’ data open to the Chinese government. Instead, officials point to the hypothetical threat that is based on the Chinese government’s capability to demand cooperation from Chinese companies.
Executive order seems to formalise deadline for TikTok US sale
Earlier in the week, Trump threatened a deadline of Sept. 15 to “close down” TikTok unless Microsoft or another company acquires it, a threat the new executive order appears to formalise. On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an expansion of the US crackdown on Chinese technology to add barring Chinese applications from US iphone app stores, citing alleged security threats and calling out TikTok and WeChat by name.
TikTok did not answer queries. Tencent and Microsoft declined to comment.
“The US thinking is that anything that is Chinese is suspect,” said Andy Mok, a senior research fellow at the Center for China and Globalization in Beijing. “They’re being targeted not as a result of what they’ve done, but who they are.”
TikTok, Facebook, Google all equally harvest user data
Leading mobile security authorities say TikTok is no more intrusive in its harvesting of user data and monitoring of user activity than US software owned by Facebook and Google.
“I am the first to yell from the rooftops when there exists a glaring privacy issue somewhere. But we just have not found anything we're able to call a smoking gun in TikTok,” mobile security expert Will Strafach told The Associated Press last month after examining the app. Strafach is CEO of Guardian, which provides a firewall for Apple devices.
Trump’s order can’t stop software use with VPN
The order doesn’t seem to be to ban Americans from using TikTok, said Kirsten Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. She added that this order would be almost impossible to enforce to begin with.
“If goal is to get teenagers to avoid using TikTok, I’m uncertain an executive order will minimize them,” she said. “Every teenager knows how exactly to use a VPN (a virtual private network). They'll just pretend they are in Canada.”
And it will be difficult to prohibit persons from using the applications if indeed they already have them, whether or not an app-store ban went into effect, said Vanderbilt University law professor Timothy Meyer.
TikTok, known because of its short, catchy videos, is widely popular among young persons in america and elsewhere. It really is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, which operates another version for the Chinese market. TikTok insists it generally does not store US user information in China, instead caching it in the US and Singapore, and says it would not share it with the Chinese government.
TikTok has 50 million active users in america
TikTok says it has 100 million US users and hundreds of millions globally. According to analyze firm App Annie, TikTok saw 50 million weekly active users in america through the week of July 19, the latest available figure. That’s up 75% from the first week of the entire year.
WeChat and its own sister app Weixin in China are hugely popular apps that incorporate messaging, financial transfers and a range of other services, and claim multiple billion users. Around the world, many persons of Chinese descent use WeChat in which to stay touch with friends and family and conduct business in mainland China.
WeChat monitors foreign users to aid censorship in China
Within China, WeChat is censored and likely to stick to content restrictions set by authorities. The Toronto-based Citizen Lab internet watchdog group has said WeChat monitors files and images shared abroad to assist its censorship in China.
The order against Tencent could have ramifications for users beyond WeChat, which is vital for personal communications and organisations that work with China. Tencent also owns parts or all of major game companies like Epic Games, publisher of Fortnite, a major video game hit, and Riot Games, which is behind League of Legends.
“This is a pretty broad and pretty quick expansion of the technology Cold War between your US and China,” said Steven Weber, faculty director for the Berkeley Center for Long Term Cybersecurity. Weber added that “you will find a plausible national security rationale” for the orders.
As president, Trump has frequently taken the unusual step of provoking confrontations, often of an individual nature, with specific companies, both American and foreign.
