Biden Revokes Trump’s TikTok & WeChat Bans

President Joe Biden has revoked the Trump-era executive order to ban TikTok and WeChat downloads in U.S. app stores.

Beyond rescinding the ban, the Biden Administration says it plans on creating a “clear intelligible criteria” to establish the amount of danger certain software downloads may pose to U.S. citizens.

While the Trump Administration took a combative approach to TikTok, Biden is seeking to create a more useful outline of procedures in light of the rising wave of cyberattacks and overall fear for national security in cyberspace. TikTok’s lawyers claim that Trump used shutting down the app as “political campaign fodder” to make him seem tougher against China before his reelection campaign. Trump’s attempt to shut down TikTok was quickly met with several lawsuits that blocked the ban.

Biden has continued some of Trump’s anti-China measures, including maintaining a list of companies that Americans are barred from investing in and supporting a billion-dollar bill to invest in American technology.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has voiced concern about TikTok’s role in American data insecurity and censorship of videos that call out the Chinese government.

TikTok still maintains that it has no connection to the Chinese government and does not pose a threat to U.S. data security. ByteDance, the company that owns the app, has confirmed it stores data in Singapore. “Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law,” the firm said in a statement.

Article by Begonia El Koury