COURT BLOCKS TRUMP BAN ON WECHAT APP

A federal court has granted a preliminary injunction halting the Trump administration’s planned ban of Chinese app Wechat, in response to a plaintiff lawsuit saying the ban would harm their First Amendment rights.

In an order issued late Saturday, the United States District Court in San Francisco said the plaintiffs, a group of Wechat users, had shown there are “serious questions” related to their First Amendment claim.

The Trump administration had planned effectively to ban Wechat and fellow Chinese-owned app Tiktok in the U.S. late Sunday by preventing them from appearing in mobile-phone app stores.

But neither ban is set to proceed immediately after the court order and a separate decision Saturday by the Commerce Department to delay the Tiktok ban until Sept. 27 because the app’s owner is negotiating a possible deal to give Oracle Corp. oversight of U.S. user data.

The Commerce Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The now-delayed bans stemmed from a pair of executive orders Trump issued Aug. 6, declaring that both apps posed threats to national security because they collected “vast swaths” of data on Americans and other users, and offered the Chinese Communist Party avenues for censoring or distorting information.

Wechat had about 3.3 million monthly active users in the United States as of August, according to analytics provider App Annie. It is a common tool for Chinese speakers in the United States to communicate with friends and relatives in China, because most Western communication apps, including Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, are banned in China.

The short-from video app Tiktok has been downloaded an estimated 100 million times by users in the United States.

A group called the Wechat Users Allliance filed suit in federal court last month seeking to stop a ban, arguing that the app represents a virtual public square for Chinese speakers in the United States and that banning it would harm free speech. The Trump administration announced details of the proposed ban Friday.

“The court grants the motion on the ground that the plaintiffs have shown serious questions going to the merits of the First Amendment claim,” Judge Laurel Beeler wrote in the order granting the preliminary injunction.

“There are serious First Amendment problems with the Wechat ban, which targets the Chinese American community and trampled on their First Amendment guaranteed freedoms to speak, to worship, to read and react to the press, and to organize and associate for numerous purposes,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Michael Bien, said in reaction to the court order.