President Biden has revoked Donald Trump’s executive orders seeking to ban TikTok, owned by ByteDance, and WeChat, owned by Tencent.
KAMPALA | LIFESTYLE UGANDA — Trump’s Executive Order to ban ByteDance-owned TikTok and Tencent-owned WeChat in the US has been revoked by President Joe Biden.
- Joe Biden revokes the Tiktok ban.
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In his August 6, 2020, executive orders, President Trump banned the US citizens and businesses from engaging in any “transaction” with Chinese platforms, and three days later, he directed ByteDance to divest its US TikTok business.
As of Wednesday (June 9), President Biden revoked executive orders designed to address “risks” posed by Chinese apps and replaced them with an executive order that focuses on “an analysis based on criteria and rigorous evidence” to address those risks.
Trump’s original executive order was accompanied by a letter from his administration to US Senate and House leaders claiming TikTok “automatically collects vast swathes of user information”.
According to the report, this data collection may give the Chinese Communist Party access to sensitive personal information of American citizens – such as tracking Federal employees and contractors’ locations, building data files about them for blackmail, and conducting corporate espionage.
“This data collection could provide China with access to sensitive and proprietary personal information pertaining to Americans, which could allow China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal data for blackmail or conduct corporate espionage.”
As of September 18, the US Department of Commerce announced that new purchase requests for WeChat and TikTok would be delayed on US app stores, but the ban has been delayed after Walmart and Oracle received tentative government approval to extend their deal with TikTok parent company ByteDance.
The US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction against a ban on TikTok downloads from US app stores on September 27.
It was announced that TikTok had until November 12 to sell its US assets to an American company to resolve national security concerns, or it would be banned from the market.
ByteDance and TikTok filed a legal petition in Washington on November 10 to overturn President Trump’s order.
On Wednesday (June 9), The White House announced the new order: “President Biden has revoked and replaced three executive orders that prohibited transactions with TikTok, WeChat, and eight other communications and financial technology applications; two of these executive orders are in litigation.
