Search the Community

(Reuters) - A U.S. judge in San Francisco on Friday rejected a Justice Department request to reverse a decision that allowed Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google to continue to offer Chinese-owned WeChat for download in U.S. app stores. U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said the government’s new evidence did not change her opinion about the Tencent app. As it has with Chinese video app TikTok, the Justice Department has argued WeChat threatens national security. WeChat has an average of 19 million daily active users in the United States. It is popul

Ban would have required Apple and Google to remove the chat app from their stores by Sunday night. A US judge early Sunday temporarily blocked a Trump administration order requiring Apple and Google to remove the Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat from their app stores. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco said in an order that WeChat users who filed a lawsuit "have shown serious questions going to the merits of the First Amendment claim, the balance of hardships tips in the plaintiffs' favor." The ruling came two days after the Tr

The US Commerce Department has issued a new order to block people in the US from downloading the popular video-sharing app TikTok as of September 20th, Reuters first reported Friday. The full order was published by the Department of Commerce on Friday morning. “Any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with ByteDance Ltd,” the order reads, “shall be prohibited to the extent permitted under applicable law.” It is set to take effect on September 20th. Over the last few weeks, TikTo

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police said on Saturday that it has closed 1,100 social media accounts, along with 31 websites, this year for unlawful activities such as trolling or blackmailing, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The police found that some social media accounts on Tencent’s Wechat and Sina-owned Weibo fabricated accusations against companies and individuals, Xinhua said, citing the Ministry of Public Security. These accounts then posted negative information online and demanded a ransom in exchange for deleting the posts, Xinhua said.

New reports from The New York Times detail some of the mind-boggling statistics and gravity that the sensationally popular WeChat messaging app yields across China. In a separate report, the paper details a government led initiative to silence Chinese Twitter users via family related threats to even go so far as physically detaining violators. Although Twitter is blocked on China’s heavily censored internet, that isn’t halting President Xi Jinping’s efforts to eliminate what his government calls “suspicious internet activity”. The report recalls a sp

After a meteoric rise in popularity in China, the SeekingArrangement dating app was removed from the country’s most popular social network, WeChat. SeekingArrangements is marketed as an app that helps “sugar daddies or mommas” and “sugar babies” connect for “mutually beneficial relationships.” The site says that for the former, “Money isn’t an issue, thus they are generous when it comes to supporting a Sugar Baby.” As for the latter: “Sugar Babies get to experience a luxurious lifestyle, and meet wealthy people on a regular basis.” The site was created in t