The order comes after a week of political posturing and scrambling for deals.
President Trump issued two executive orders late Thursday against Chinese-owned TikTok and messaging app WeChat, citing national security concerns. The orders take effect in 45 days and prohibits any U. S. company or person from transacting with ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company or WeChat. That means the companies would not be able to appear on Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store in the U. S. The orders signal increasing tensions in U. S.-Beijing relations in the run-up to the November elections. Trump had earlier threatened to ban TikTok from the U. S.. “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,” according to the TikTok order.
