United States President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday banning all transactions with Chinese company ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok and WeChat, within 45 days citing national security concerns.
“The TikTok app may be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, and the United States must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security,” Trump said in an order. He also noted in his order that India has already banned TikTok among other Chinese apps.
In the other order, Trump said, “WeChat automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users. This data collection allows the Chinese Communist Party to access Americans’ personal and proprietary information.”
“Any transaction by a United States person or within the United States that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, causes a violation of, or attempts to violate the prohibition set forth in this order is prohibited,” the order added.
Moreover, he said that the Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration and US Armed Forces have already banned TikTok on government phones.
Trump had set September 15 as a deadline for TikTok to find a US buyer, failing which he would shut down the app in the US. He said he would support the sale of TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft Corp if the US government got a “substantial portion” of the sales price.
There are around 100 million TikTok users in the US and Republicans have raised concerns about the political fallout by banning this app. On Monday, Microsoft had announced its decision to pursue discussions with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, in a matter of weeks.
