The US Department of Commerce announced today that it will ban the download of the popular Chinese app TikTok and WeChat , starting Sunday.
With this move, the Department enforces the two executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in early August, in which he described the two applications as a national danger to the country.
The Aug. 14 order gave TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, 45 days to sell its U.S. business rights. Under the order, any transaction with TikTok’s owner or its subsidiaries would be prohibited. The second order also prohibited any transaction related to WeChat by any person or in connection with any property.
With this decision, TikTok and WeChat downloads will be banned starting Sunday, September 20, and the apps will be removed from Apple and Google’s app stores. However, existing users will still be able to use the apps if they already installed them before they were removed from the App Stores. In addition, updates to existing apps are prohibited. The Department of Commerce is still prohibiting any payment transactions through WeChat in the US.
“While the threats posed by WeChat and TikTok are not exactly the same, they are similar,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a press release. “Both collect vast amounts of data from users, including network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories. Both are active participants in China’s political and military integration and are subject to mandatory cooperation with government intelligence agencies. This combination makes the use of WeChat and TikTok a national security risk.”
Until recently, it seemed that the TikTok ban would be avoided through potential deals between US-based companies, most notably Microsoft and Oracle. In early August, Microsoft announced that it was in talks with ByteDance to acquire TikTok's US operations.
But as the deadline approaches, ByteDance has said it will not include TikTok's algorithm as part of the sale, according to a report in the South China Morning Post. The Chinese company has told Microsoft that it will not be the new owner of the rights to the app.
