Stay on WeChat ban upheld by US court
The Trump administration lost a bid to enforce its prohibitions against the Chinese-owned “super app” WeChat in the US after appealing a judge’s ruling that the ban probably violates the free-speech rights of its users.
Upholding a trial judge, the US Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Monday rejected the administration’s request for a stay of the preliminary injunction that prevents the administration from enforcing a wide range of measures, including barring the app from Apple and Google’s app stores for US downloads, over purported national security concerns. Shares of WeChat owner Tencent Holdings Ltd. jumped as much as 3.1%, the most in two weeks, on Tuesday to an intraday record in Hong Kong trading.
The Trump administration has claimed that WeChat is a threat because Tencent is intertwined with the Chinese Communist Party, which can use the app to disseminate propaganda, track users, and steal their private and proprietary data. It’s a similar argument that the administration has used to target the TikTok app, owned by ByteDance Ltd., while also forcing a sale of that app’s US operations.
US magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction on September 19—the day before the ban was to go into effect—at the request of a group of US WeChat users, who argued that the prohibitions would violate the freespeech rights of millions of Chinese-speaking Americans who rely on it.
Even as Tencent gets a reprieve from the broader WeChat ban, the company may still face restrictions against the app’s payments services.