US President Donald Trump issued executive orders on Thursday banning any US transactions with ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns video-sharing app TikTok, and Tencent, owner of the WeChat app, starting in 45 days.
The orders come as the Trump administration said this week it was stepping up efforts to purge “untrusted” Chinese apps from US digital networks and called the Chinese-owned short-video app TikTok and messenger app WeChat “significant threats.”
In the other, Trump said WeChat “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.”
Trump said this week he would support the sale of TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft Corp, if the US government got a “substantial portion” of the sales price but warned he will ban the service in the United States on September 15.
Tencent and ByteDance declined to comment.