President Donald J. Trump, joined by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, talks to members of the press on the South Lawn of the White House Wednesday, July 29, 2020, prior to boarding Marine One to begin his trip to Texas. (Official White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
President Trump late Thursday issued executive orders against the parent companies, based in China, of the TikTok and WeChat apps – banning them if they aren't sold within 45 days.
The White House sent a letter to Congress about the moves, based on national security concerns, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The move vastly raises the pressure on China to sell the products quickly, as President Trump has said should happen.
"The spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," the president said in his letter.
The president has explained that the companies obtain "vast swaths of information" about Americans through their software programs and that gives the Chinese Communist Party "access to Americans' personal and proprietary information."
The order bans U.S. companies or residents from business transactions with the companies, TikTok owner ByteDance and WeChat owner Tencent Holdings, starting Sept. 20.
The president wrote that "action must be taken to address the threat."
His announcement noted TikTok reportedly has been downloaded some 175 million times and more than one billion globally.
And it records "internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. 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."
He continued, "This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 novel coronavirus.
"These risks are real. The Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration, and the United States Armed Forces have already banned the use of TikTok on federal government phones. The government of India recently banned the use of TikTok and other Chinese mobile applications throughout the country; in a statement, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology asserted that they were 'stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users' data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India,'" the announcement said.
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