The U.S. Justice Department said Friday (Oct. 2) it is appealing a judge’s decision to block Apple and Google from allowing WeChat, the overseas version of WeChat owned by a Chinese company, to be downloaded from U.S. app stores.
The U.S. government said it is appealing to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals a temporary restraining order issued Sept. 19 by Federal District Court Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco.
The Justice Department had earlier said that Beeler’s order was erroneous, and that the ruling “allows continued, unrestricted use of the cell phone application Wechat, which the administration has determined poses a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.
In imposing the ban on Wechat, the U.S. government noted that Wechat collected information on U.S. citizens and censored speech in accordance with the political standards of the Chinese Communist Party. Some U.S. WeChat users, in their lawsuit against the U.S. administration, counter-argued that the administration’s practices violated free speech.
The “United States WeChat Users Association” (USWUA) sued the U.S. government in federal court in San Francisco to lift the ban on September 18, the day after the U.S. Department of Commerce released details of the WeChat ban.
Judge Biller held that the Trump administration’s actions would restrict WeChat users’ freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and therefore stayed the ban against WeChat.
In his ruling, the judge wrote, “The government’s overall security interests are important. On this record, however, while the government has demonstrated that China’s activities raise significant national security concerns, it has produced little evidence that the injunction, which effectively applies to all U.S. WeChat users, addresses those concerns.”
Apptopia, an app information analytics firm, said in early August that WeChat’s overseas version has an average of 19 million daily active users in the United States. The platform is owned by Chinese tech company Tencent.
A U.S. judge in Washington issued a stay of the injunction on Sunday after the Commerce Department issued an injunction against TikTok, the overseas version of Shakespeare, another Chinese-owned app.
TikTok has struck a deal with US companies Oracle and Walmart to form a new company to avoid its shutdown in the US, but there are uncertainties about whether the deal will be approved by the Trump administration.
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