In
August, President Donald Trump unveiled a proposed sweeping ban
on U.S. transactions with Tencent Holdings Ltd, owner of the
popular mainland Chinese app. The executive order, which called
WeChat and Bytedance's short-video app TikTok "significant
threats" to national security, followed stepped-up U.S. efforts
to purge "untrusted" Chinese apps from U.S. digital networks.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is set to release regulations by
Sunday clarifying what WeChat transactions will be prohibited.
WeChat users have filed a motion in U.S. District Court in San
Francisco seeking a preliminary injunction to bar the Trump
administration from prohibiting the use of WeChat in the United
States by individual users, businesses and groups. A hearing on
the request is for Thursday.
The Justice Department responded in a filing on Wednesday that
Ross does not plan to target persons or groups who only download
or use WeChat to convey personal or business information and
said they would not face criminal or civil penaltes.
But the department added that "use of the app for such
communications could be directly or indirectly impaired through
measures targeted at other transactions."
The WeChat users who sued said the order apparently prohibits
"millions of WeChat users in the United States ... from using
the most popular social media space for Chinese speakers in the
world."
WeChat has been downloaded 19 million times in the United
States, showed data from Sensor Tower, but in China, the app is
ubiquitous as a medium for services, games and payments.
Trump's order said WeChat "automatically captures vast swaths of
information from its users," which "threatens to allow the
Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and
proprietary information."
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Richard Chang)
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