Elaine Ou, Columnist

Bans Against TikTok and WeChat Would Backfire Anyway

Users could easily find ways to evade U.S. security restrictions, introducing security problems of their own.

September 21, 2020 at 4:09 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Hard to stop.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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Those who were anticipating a disruption of WeChat and TikTok got some good news over the weekend.

On Sunday, a judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked a ban on the communications and social-media app WeChat ordered Friday by President Donald Trump. A separate administration order banning the video-sharing service TikTok from app stores was delayed by a week after the Chinese owners agreed under pressure from Washington to sell an ownership stake to several U.S. companies.