A U.S. judge in San Francisco on Friday rejected a Justice Department request to quash a decision to allow Apple and Alphabet’s Google to continue offering the download of Chinese-owned WeChat in US app stores.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said new government evidence had not changed her opinion on the tencent app. As with the Chinese TikTok Video App
, the Department of Justice argued that WeChat threatens national security.
WeChat has an average of 19 million active users
WeChat is a mobile application all in one that combines services similar to Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Venmo. The app is an essential part of the daily life of many people in China and has over one billion users.
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The Justice Department has appealed Beeler’s ruling allowing continued use of the Chinese mobile app to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but a ruling is unlikely to be released until December.
In a lawsuit filed by WeChat users, Beeler last month blocked an order from the U.S. Department of Commerce that would take effect on September 20 and would have demanded that the app be removed from U.S. app stores. United States
The Commerce Department order would also ban other U.S. transactions with WeChat, which could render the app unusable in the United States.
“The record does not support the conclusion that the government ‘strictly adapted’ the prohibited transactions to protect its national security interests,” Beeler wrote on Friday.
He said the evidence “supports the conclusion that the fiscal restraint discourse is far more than necessary to advance the government’s legitimate interests.”
WeChat users argued that the government was seeking “an unprecedented ban on all media” and offered only “speculation” about the harm caused by Americans’ use of WeChat.
In a similar case, a U.S. appeals court agreed to expedite the government’s appeal against a ruling preventing the government from banning new downloads from U.S. app stores of the proprietary short video sharing app. Chinese TikTok.