The Justice Department Oct. 8 filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, saying the preliminary injunction issued last month delaying a ban of Chinese-owned social media video app TikTok should be lifted.
The injunction issued Sept. 27 by Judge Carl Nichols in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia prevented the Trump Administration from banning use of the TikTok app in the U.S. Trump alleges TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, remains a security threat by collecting data on U.S. users and storing it on Chinese-based servers.
Subscribe HERE to the FREE Media Play News Daily Newsletter!
The ban, which also includes the WeChat app owned by Chinese media giant Tencent, is part of the administration’s ongoing Cold War with China that is partly based on politics and commercial trade between the world’s two largest economies.
Trump in August issued an executive order mandating the ban unless TikTok sold its U.S. operations. An acquisition deal involving chip maker Oracle and Walmart for 20% in a newly configured ByteDance parent remains in the works, but has not been finalized.
Trump’s ban could affect the 100 million Americans who use TikTok for social messaging and commercial influencing. At the same time, China has been blocking its citizens from using American apps such as Facebook, Twitter — and Netflix.
While Netflix is not a social media service, the world’s largest SVOD platform remains largely a non-player in China. In 2017, Netflix licensed select original content to iQiyi in the erstwhile communist country. That agreement reportedly ended last year due to limited consumer response, according to iQiyi CEO Gong Yu.
“We had an agreement with Netflix two years ago, but because of the verification system and users’ tastes, the effect wasn’t that great, so we didn’t continue the partnership,” Yu said in a media interview last year translated by CNBC.