The apps appear to have the upper hand.
For months President Donald Trump has been railing against the popular video sharing platform TikTok, as well as the messaging service WeChat. Both he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have cited data-mining security concerns with the Chinese-owned companies. The products were due to have new downloads prohibited starting Sunday, but recent developments have halted their ban.
TikTok, something of a thorn-in-the-President’s side ever since the Trump campaign’s embarrassing overestimate of interest during his June Tulsa rally, has averted its removal by one week because of movement on a deal between Walmart and Oracle that Trump has approved “in concept.”
While Chinese company ByteDance will not be selling TikTok outright, the idea is that it will give up significant control of its global business to stay in the United States, which is currently its second largest market. (India was the top international market prior to its being banned in June.) The new TikTok Global will use Oracle’s cloud-based data services and Walmart will act as its “commercial partner.”
“I have given the deal my blessing,” Trump told reporters on Saturday. “If they get it done, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s okay, too,” he added, making it unclear if he will continue to push for a ban if these large companies fail to come to terms.
The wildly successful TikTok has over 100 million users in the United States and the recent threat of a ban sent new downloads up 12 percent.
That jump in numbers is nothing compared to what happened with messaging service WeChat, which had a 150 percent increase on Friday. It rose from the 1,385th ranked free iPhone app to number 100. The app is seen by many Chinese-Americans as an increasingly essential conduit to family in China, where other services like Facebook are banned.
An 11th hour court injunction on free speech grounds halted the ban late on Saturday. Judge Laurel Beeler in San Fransisco wrote that WeChat “serves as a virtual public square for the Chinese-speaking and Chinese-American community in the United States and is (as a practical matter) their only means of communication.”
Over 1 billion people communicate via WeChat worldwide.
Lawyers for the government claim that WeChat’s parent company, Tencent Holdings, has ties with the Chinese Communist Party, and that the app can be used to disseminate propaganda, track users, and steal their private and proprietary data. The WeChat users who brought their case to court say the restrictions on the app are driven by election-year politics.
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