After President Trump’s shock executive orders giving ByteDance and Tencent just 45 days to sell ByteDance and TikTok, respectively, Twitter ran wild with the possibility that the Tencent order would put all of its acquisitions on the chopping block. That would include American-founded gaming giants such as Riot Games, which produces blockbuster hits such as League of Legends.
The relevant text of the order reads as follows:
The explicit order doesn’t seem to include Tencent properties as a whole in its directive, but to make matters more clear, a White House official confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that the order only applies to WeChat.
TikTok may be the more talked-about ban, but WeChat has long been the more pervasive battleground in the Chinese Communist Party’s espionage campaign against the free world. WeChat functionally combines the utility of every American networking app from Facebook to Uber, but with the backing of Beijing to enact constant oversight. Although the official company line of Tencent is that users not registered as residents of mainland China are exempt from CCP surveillance, experts at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found otherwise:
Tencent has not only failed to explain to its international users how their communications content is being used to facilitate the censorship apparatus that is applied to China-registered WeChat accounts, but the company has also failed to explain, or clarify, whether international users’ communications content are subject to surveillance that is not associated with the censorship of content that is deemed sensitive in China. Put another way, the content surveillance and hashing system we discuss in this report is at least part of the broader censorship system which has been fully deployed towards China-registered accounts.
The Trump administration is absolutely correct to view our economic relationship with China, in particular, as a matter of national security in the same way that we viewed the USSR during the Cold War. Incentivizing American companies such as Riot and Blizzard to seek independence from Beijing-backed companies should be imperative, but for all intents and purposes of passing a politically feasible and immediate measure to protect American data from the most ruthless dictatorship on the planet today should be applauded by all, regardless of political affiliation.
