WeChat users are censored by the government in China. government can’t ban it entirely, because that’s their free speech - a right guaranteed to them in the U.S. users are trying to reassure each other that they already have the app, and the U.S. She blames politicians, especially Trump, for her current stress: “We’re the pawn that they can manipulate to put anywhere on the chess board.” She still doesn’t know if she’ll be able to access her money, or what she’ll do with all those stored memories of her father. Those offer secure messaging and aren’t Chinese-owned. The day after Trump’s order, Zhu got dozens of queries from friends, family members and colleagues, asking if they should switch to messaging options such as Telegram, WhatsApp or Signal. Some feared the order might prevent their subsidiaries in China from using the app, which could place them at a competitive disadvantage. multinationals pushed back against the Trump order on WeChat in a conference call with White House officials, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. But that’s especially difficult for regular users of WeChat.Įxecutives of more than a dozen U.S. Both orders have thrown users into confusion, leading some to begin moving to alternative services. 6 order, released after hours without additional explanation, purportedly aims to ban all “transactions related to WeChat.” Trump simultaneously issued a nearly identical order aimed at the popular, Chinese-owned video app TikTok. “If they banned it entirely, it will wipe out connections to my wife’s family, all our friends and my network of business contacts I built over 22 years,” says Braybrook, who now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He could lose roughly 500 WeChat contacts, few of which he could reach without the app. in 2017, says the app is irreplaceable for him and his China-born wife. Kurt Braybrook, who spent 22 years doing business in Shanghai before moving back to the U.S. that have work in China rely on it as well. But it’s what connects immigrants and students from China to their pasts and to each other. downloads - in the range of 19 to 26 million.Īnother Zoom meeting?: Make video presentations more interesting with filters, polls and live animalsĥG networks are not shining: But with new phones from Samsung and Apple, could this be 5G's year?įor people in the U.S., WeChat has less functionality than it does in China. Mobile app firms have varying estimates for U.S. It has over a billion users, owner Tencent says, mostly in China. Many Chinese businesses don’t even take credit cards anymore, just WeChat. In China, WeChat, or Weixin as it’s known, is critical infrastructure - texting, social media, cab-hailing, payments and more, all wrapped into one app. Most important, it’s where she keeps videos and audio clips of her father, who died four years ago. It’s where she stores Chinese currency in her virtual wallet. It’s how she talks to her mother and old friends from China, which she left in 2008, and how she communicates with her colleagues as a public relations manager for a Chinese-owned consulting company. “It’s the first thing I check in the morning,” Sha Zhu, a Chinese-American in Washington, says of WeChat. as early as mid-September, potentially severing vital relationships. That lifeline is now under attack by an executive order from President Donald Trump that could ban the app in the U.S. who use the Chinese app WeChat, it’s a lifeline to friends, family, customers and business contacts in China. Watch Video: US stock market closes at an all-time high despite recessionįor millions of people in the U.S.
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