Donald Trump’s WeChat ban targets a celebrated Chinese innovation at the heart of the world’s largest mobile gaming and social media empire, threatening one of the more eye-catching stock rallies of 2020.
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Tencent added to Friday’s sharp decline to start the week, helping lead weakness in technology shares after the US’s move to ban residents from doing business with the company’s WeChat app.
Twitter has expressed an interest in buying video platform TikTok’s US operations, it has been reported. The video-sharing app is already the subject of takeover discussions with Microsoft.
Tencent, one of Asia’s biggest companies, is little known beyond the tech world. But its WeChat super app has more than a billion users worldwide.
Index heavyweight Naspers dropped 4.4% after US President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders prohibiting US residents from doing business with the Chinese-owned TikTok and WeChat apps.
Washington’s plan to ban certain technologies of Chinese origin is a sign of “madness” in US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, China’s state-backed tabloid Global Times wrote in an editorial on Thursday.
The Trump administration’s move to ban US residents from doing business with Tencent’s WeChat app rippled through Chinese markets, erasing $46-billion from the Internet giant’s market value.
Facebook on Wednesday for the first time took down a post by US President Donald Trump, which the company said violated its rules against sharing misinformation about the coronavirus.
The Trump administration said on Wednesday it was stepping up efforts to purge “untrusted” Chinese apps from US digital networks and called TikTok and WeChat “significant threats”.
When US President Donald Trump declared TikTok a threat to American national security, there were more than a few people who thought, “What’s that?”