Trump Bans Chinese Apps TikTok, WeChat Starting Sunday, Raising Questions About Oracle-ByteDance Deal

The Trump Administration will ban U.S. transactions involving Chinese-owned social apps TikTok and WeChat, effective Sunday, citing national security and data usage concerns.

The decision came one day after the Treasury Department entered into a tentative agreement with TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to allow Oracle (ORCL) to acquire a minority stake in the populat video-sharing app. WeChat is owned by the Chinese company Tencent Holdings.

Complicating the matter, President Donald Trump is expected to decide later Friday if he will approve the Oracle-TikTok arrangement.

It is unclear how the prohibition order will affect the Oracle deal.

However, on Friday morning, the U.S. Commerce Department – citing Trump’s executive order in early August to ban the apps – said that the Chinese Communist Party has “demonstrated the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the U.S.”

WeChat and TikTok pose similar threats, the department said, as they each collect “vast swaths of data from users, including network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories.”

The department further claimed that each app is an “active participant in China’s civil-military fusion and is subject to mandatory cooperation” with the intelligence services of the Chinese Communist Party. As a result, WeChat and TikTok create “unacceptable risks” to U.S. national security.

The prohibitions, the department explained, will protect U.S. users by eliminating access to these apps and significantly reduce their functionality.

Under the order, the apps will be banned from both the iOS App Store and Google’s Play Store, and companies will be prohibited from hosting them in the US.

However, with respect to TikTok, if it is able to resolve the government’s national security concerns by Nov. 12, the prohibition order might be lifted.

“Today’s actions prove once again that President Trump will do everything in his power to guarantee our national security and protect Americans from the threats of the Chinese Communist Party,” Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in statement. “At the president’s direction, we have taken significant action to combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data, while promoting our national values, democratic rules-based norms, and aggressive enforcement of U.S. laws and regulations.”

The government further warned that if other apps were determined to replicate the “illicit behavior” of WeChat or TikTok, the president will have the authority to impose additional prohibition orders.

Endgadget.com wrote that the wording of the prohibition order makes it clear that the government wants the apps to disappear in the U.S.

“The White House is trying to leave no loopholes that would allow access to [TikTok],” Endgadget added. “And since it dropped the news on Friday, with the ban… [effective on] Sunday, ByteDance and its partners will have no time to attempt to delay or reverse the decision. It will also force hosting services to react quickly to remove the app.”

But Mark Grondin of SpectrumPulse, tweeted: “This [order] will be challenged in court almost immediately. Don't panic. [Virtual private networks] exist, and the generations that use TikTok will figure it out.”