United States President Joe Biden has dropped executive ban orders which had been issued by his predecessor President Donald Trump giant Chinese short video sharing app TikTok. The orders also included a ban on Chinese messaging, social media and mobile payment platform WeChat.
Trump had issued orders blocking any new downloads these two applications in the United States. President’s Trump administration was citing personal user data concerns as the reason behind the ban.
According to President Trump, these Chinese entities could not be trusted with the personal data of users since China’s laws requires all Chinese tech companies to share personal users’ data with the authorities upon government request.
During his administration, Trump had accused several Chinese tech companies of spying for Beijing with Huawei Technologies taking the ultimate blow after it was banned from undertaking any projects in the United States and further from using Google services in its products.
Thereafter, Trump issued orders banning news downloads of TikTok and WeChat in the U.S however, this never materialized since it was blocked by court orders.
Following lifting of the ban, President Biden ordered the Commerce Department to monitor such entities more so TikTok to find out if they pose any threat to national security and report to him in a period of 120 days.
“This is a positive step in the right direction. The U.S. will treat Chinese companies fairly and avoid politicizing economic and trade issues,” said Gao Feng, spokesperson at the Chinese commerce ministry, after the new directives.
WeChat which has been downloaded more than 19 million times in the United States also expressed its relief by this turnaround decision from Biden.
“Wrong-headed ban on WeChat that would have led to the unprecedented shutdown of a major platform for communications relied on by millions of people in the United States,” said Michael Bien, the lead lawyer for WeChat.
