September 21, 2020
A judge has blocked a US government attempt to ban the Chinese messaging and payments app, WeChat.
US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said the ban raised serious questions related to the constitution’s first amendment, guaranteeing free speech.
The Department of Commerce had announced a bar on WeChat appearing in US app stores from Sunday, effectively shutting it down.
The Trump administration has alleged it threatens national security.
It says the app could pass user data to the Chinese government.
Both WeChat and China have strongly denied the claim. Tencent, the conglomerate that owns WeChat, had previously described the US ban as “unfortunate”.
The ruling comes just after TikTok, which was also named in the Department of Commerce order, reached a deal with US firms Oracle and Walmart to hopefully allow them to keep operating.
What happened in court?
The case came to court after a group of US WeChat users challenged President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to shut WeChat down in the country.
The US Justice Department argued that blocking the executive order would “frustrate and displace the president’s determination of how best to address threats to national security”.
However Judge Beeler, sitting in San Francisco, noted that “while the general evidence about the threat to national security related to China (regarding technology and mobile technology) is considerable, the specific evidence about WeChat is modest”.
( Source :BBC News)
