To safeguard national security, the U.S. Trump administration ordered the blocking of two Chinese social networking programs, TikTok and WeChat, last year, but was blocked by the district court and the Justice Department subsequently appealed. But after the Biden administration came to power, the Justice Department recently called a halt to related appeal cases one after another.
On February 10, the U.S. Department of Justice applied to the federal appeals court to stay the hearing of two appeals regarding the ban on TikTok (China’s ShakeYin international version).
On February 11, the DOJ used the same tactic to handle the Wechat (the overseas version of China’s WeChat) appeal.
The DOJ’s maneuvering delayed the Trump Administration‘s chances of a flip-flop in its quest to block TikTok and WeChat.
TikTok has a huge user base among U.S. teens. WeChat, on the other hand, is used primarily among Chinese Americans and Chinese students. The software is suspected of collecting information on U.S. users for the Chinese Communist Party and of trying to interfere in U.S. politics. Last year, the Trump administration’s Commerce Department ordered WeChat to be taken down and also asked for a deadline to take down TikTok in order to force TikTok to fully sell its U.S. business to a U.S. company.
However, the district court blocked the blocking orders for both WeChat and TikTok due to lawsuits launched by U.S. users. According to U.S. media reports, these lawsuits were “carefully orchestrated” by the Chinese side.
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