Trump executive order seeks to ban Tiktok, WeChat in 45 days

These orders will certainly be challenged in court and it’s unclear exactly what “transactions” means until the Secretary of Commerce explains it, but Tencent has investments in many US companies. It operates games like PUBG Mobile, owns Riot Games which makes League of Legends and Valorant, plus it owns a significant portion of Fortnite developer Epic Games. Its ownership stake in Activision Blizzard became an issue last year when a Hearthstone esports player was banned for supporting the Hong Kong protests.

Tencent Films has also had a hand in producing many major movies recently, like Wonder Woman, Top Gun: Maverick, Terminator: Dark Fate and Venom. The same applies for music, as Tencent has a stake in Spotify after the companies swapped equity in 2018, recently closed a $3.3 billion deal to take an ownership stake in Universal Music Group and also owns a share of Warner Music.

In the orders, a justification given for the ban is “national emergency with respect to the information and communications technology and services supply chain.” It also claims they could “be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party.” As we noted previously, they also claim to be concerned about how TikTok “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories.”

We’ve contacted many of the companies potentially affected by this order and will update the article when more details are available.

Same 45 days order to #WeChat and its owner #Tencent pic.twitter.com/C0ZPEURrH2

— Jane Tang 唐家婕 (@ccjanetang) August 7, 2020

Trump also signed an EO related to WeChat, saying: “WeChat automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users —threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.“

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) August 7, 2020

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