Our brief in support of the users on appeal focuses on the disastrous consequences of the ban for the Internet as a whole. In September, a federal magistrate judge in the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction, finding that the plaintiffs had raised serious questions about the constitutionality of the government’s ban on WeChat, and the government appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. So the Trump administration’s decision to ban WeChat has disastrous consequences for the ability of millions of Americans to communicate, in clear violation of their First Amendment rights.īefore the WeChat ban went into effect, a newly formed U.S.-based WeChat Users’ Alliance sued the Trump Administration-and succeeded in stopping the ban from going into effect. Due to WeChat’s reach and design, it has no equivalent, since many messaging applications developed in North America and Europe are banned or otherwise difficult to access within China. Many U.S.-based users of WeChat are members of the Chinese diaspora, and they use the application to stay in touch with friends, relatives, and contacts around the world, including in China. readers for its “ contagious vibe,” WeChat arguably enables even more important connections: it is a messaging application used by over a billion people worldwide, including 19 million users in the United States. jurisdiction.ĭespite the government’s claimed national security rationale, it was clear that the goal of these orders was censorship: entirely closing this country off from two wildly popular apps that provide the means of communication for millions of people. users “continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” and they directed the Commerce Department to draw up regulations to prohibit “any transaction” connected to either app within U.S. The executive orders claimed the spread of applications developed in China to U.S. government claims to deplore.Įarlier this year, President Trump issued a pair of executive orders intended to ban two massively popular Chinese-owned applications, TikTok and WeChat, from the United States. shores, we explain, the administration has taken an extraordinary step that weakens user security, intentionally dismembers infrastructure that keeps the Internet running, and emulates the very authoritarian tactics the U.S.
In its rush to eradicate WeChat from U.S. Today, EFF-along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Internet Society-filed an amicus brief in support of U.S.-based users of the Chinese app WeChat, as they fight President Trump’s unconstitutional ban of the application.
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