Judge warns she may temporarily halt Donald Trump's ban on Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat because order is too vague
A U.S. judge said she is willing to temporarily halt President Donald Trump's ban on Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat following requests by its users, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.
Judge Laurel Beeler said at a hearing on Thursday she is ready to grant a preliminary injunction as the president's order is too vague, the report said.
However, a final decision was not issued by the judge on the ban, according to Bloomberg.
'I'm sympathetic to the anxiety it creates for the people affected,' Beeler said at the hearing. 'This is the only mode of communication for these people.'
President Donald Trump has sought to ban Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat, as well as TikTok, saying they are threats to national security. A judge on Thursday said she may delay Trump's order as being too vague
WeChat users had filed a motion in U.S. District Court in San Francisco seeking a preliminary injunction to bar the Trump administration from prohibiting the use of WeChat in the United States by individual users, businesses and groups.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is set to release regulations by Sunday clarifying what WeChat transactions will be prohibited.
The WeChat users who sued said the order apparently prohibits 'millions of WeChat users in the United States ... from using the most popular social media space for Chinese speakers in the world.'
Judge Laurel Beeler said Thursday that she is ready to grant an injunction on Trump's proposed ban but has not decided on a final decision
WeChat has been downloaded 19 million times in the United States, showed data from Sensor Tower, but in China, the app is ubiquitous as a medium for services, games and payments.
Trump's order said WeChat 'automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users,' which 'threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information.'
The Justice Department said on Wednesday WeChat users would not face civil or criminal penalties even if the United States bans the app.
President Trump in August banned U.S. transactions with Tencent Holdings Ltd, owner of WeChat, and Bytedance's short-video app TikTok, calling them 'significant threats' to national security.
The president previously said that he would ban TikTok if it wasn't sold to an American company. In an Aug. 6 order, Trump said TikTok 'reportedly censors content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive,' is potentially a source for disinformation campaigns and 'threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans´ personal and proprietary information.'
TikTok maintains that it has not shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not do so, says it does not censor videos at the request of Chinese authorities and notes that moderators for U.S. operations are led by a U.S. team.
President Donald Trump's order said WeChat 'automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users,' which 'threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information'
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is set to release regulations by Sunday clarifying which WeChat transactions would be prohibited
TikTok has proposed a deal where it allows Oracle to handle all of its data in a bid to assuage Trump's concerns.
The Oracle arrangement, according to a person familiar with the matter who isn´t authorized to speak publicly, entrusts TikTok´s U.S. user data to Oracle, which would oversee technical operations for TikTok in the U.S. Oracle won´t develop code for the app, but will review it and updates to it.
Not all Republicans are on board with the Oracle deal. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a frequent critic of both China and the tech sector, called for the government to reject the Oracle partnership and instead pursue a full sale of TikTok in the U.S. or ban the app.
'An ongoing `partnership´ that allows for anything other than the full emancipation of the TikTok software from potential Chinese Communist Party control is completely unacceptable, and flatly inconsistent with the President´s Executive Order of Aug. 6,' he wrote on Tuesday.
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