The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is asking a federal appeals court to allow the government to ban the China-owned messaging app WeChat in the country. The DOJ has filed a notice of appeal against the preliminary junction issued by US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler last month.
The injunction blocked the US Department of Commerce order which included removing WeChat from mobile app stores in the country. The order also barred other transactions with the app, essentially rendering it unusable.
Magistrate Beeler of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on September 19 issued a preliminary injunction blocking these restrictions and prohibitions. She said the ban would violate the free-speech rights of the American WeChat users. The Trump administration is now asking the court to reinstate them, Bloomberg reports. WeChat reportedly has an average of 19 million daily active users in the US.
The US asks the court to reinstate the WeChat ban
The Trump administration has repeatedly said that WeChat, owned by Tencent Holdings, is a threat to national security. President Donald Trump believes the Chinese Communist Party may have a backdoor to the Chinese company. This would allow the Chinese government to spy on American WeChat users and steal their private data.
The Commerce Department last month passed an order asking mobile app stores in the country to pull the app from their respective platforms. However, the US WeChat Users Alliance expectedly challenged the order and won a preliminary injunction.
Lawyers for the group argue that the Trump administration has no evidence for its claims. The group says these are politically-driven decisions ahead of the 2020 election.
“The government is trying to seek an emergency stay of the preliminary injunction,” said lawyer Clay Zhu. “But it has waited for twelve days to file the appeal. If WeChat truly represents an imminent threat to national security as the government claims, it should have filed an appeal on the same day or the next day of the preliminary injunction order. The reality is that there is no emergency.”
The Trump administration also has similar security concerns over TikTok and has asked its Chinese parent ByteDance to divest the app’s US operations to an American company. TikTok has reached a deal with Oracle but is yet to receive regulatory approvals.
President Trump has, meanwhile, threatened to ban the app if the new TikTok doesn’t satisfy the government’s security concerns. A federal judge in Washington last week issued a similar preliminary injunction to halt app stores from removing TikTok. The judge hasn’t yet decided on whether to block other restrictions that would see an outright ban of the app. Those restrictions are set to take effect on November 12th.