Donald Trump bans TikTok and WeChat in the US - stay 45 days

What President Donald Trump threatened to happen last week. He signed a document titled “TikTok Threat Confrontation Order”. The essence of the document is to block transactions sent to TikTok developers of the Chinese company ByteDance. The ban will take effect in 45 days. At the same time, the US Senate voted to ban the use of TikTok on devices owned by the government and government officials.

US President Donald Trump has banned the operators of the social network TikTok and the Internet group Tencent, which comes from China, from operating and selling their services in the United States.

Essentially, the US government is putting a gun on the chests of Chinese companies: if their services continue to operate in the large US market, the relevant units must be sold to non-Chinese companies. The decree, signed by Trump, sets a 45-day deadline after which the ban on TikTok and the Tencent-operated WeChat messenger in the United States will take effect.

Unless ByteDance’s US business is taken over by a US company within 45 days

TikTok is operated by the Chinese company ByteDance. It is one of the fastest-growing social networks at present. It mainly works on the basis of short video clips that users communicate with each other. The platform is especially popular with the youngest target groups. Microsoft recently positioned itself to take over at least some of the services.

Interestingly, at the same time, the popular Chinese messenger WeChat. Which is owned by the Chinese giant Tencent, fell under the distribution. The same prohibition is imposed on him. This is quite a significant step since Tencent is actively investing in many American companies. So, the Chinese fully or partially own PUBG Mobile, Riot Games (League of Legends) Forticite Epic Games, Activision Blizzard. The company’s division, Tencent Films, has produced many major film projects, including Wonder Woman, Terminator: Dark Fate and Venom. The same goes for music: Tencent has stakes in Spotify, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music. Since WeChat is hardly popular in the US, it won’t pose much of a problem. But it might just be the first step in an attack on Tencent.

Protecting Help for Microsoft

With the adoption of the presidential decree, things are developing positively, at least for the residents of Redmond. Because the deadline should strengthen Microsoft’s bargaining power and bring down the price appropriately. Because if ByteDance is not on sale now, the US business will be completely canceled in mid-December.

The current actions of the US government are part of a trade conflict with China that has been going on for many years. In particular, Huawei has been at the center of the dispute so far. But it has also influenced many other points. However, in many cases, it has been shown that the economic blockades that have often been used in the past are no longer possible due to the huge networked structure of the world economy. In particular, if you disconnect the US economy from relations with Chinese companies, you will also be doing huge damage to it.

However, there is another aspect with companies that are now being affected, As is the case with all social media, some very sensitive data about the interests and habits of users that are currently being collected and processed in oppressive China is pooled.