Trump moves against Chinese owners of TikTok and WeChat apps

NEW YORK (AP) — President Trump is broadly prohibiting unspecified ‘transactions’ with Chinese owners of TikTok and WeChat via executive order in 45 days.

Trump had threatened a deadline of Sept. 15 to “close down” TikTok unless Microsoft or “somebody else” bought it.

Video app TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance;,Microsoft and Tencent, which owns messaging app WeChat, had no immediate replies to questions.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday had said that the U.S. government was expanding its crackdown on Chinese technology because of alleged security threats, including to personal apps, and called out TikTok and WeChat by name.

WeChat and its sister app Weixin in China are hugely popular messaging apps. TikTok has hundreds of millions of users globally.