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#Bytedance chinese tiktok china wechat alipayliaotechcrunch how to

Biden has since revived his predecessor’s arguments in targeting TikTok-but not WeChat. A judge blocked the move, and upon coming into office, President Joe Biden revoked Trump’s executive orders, adding that further evaluation was needed. After he announced the plan, WeChat downloads surged. In 2020, former President Donald Trump tried banning WeChat, along with TikTok, on the grounds of national security. I’ve never had any kind of hacking or any kind of problem at all.” “I’ve been using WeChat since it was invented. That’s their prerogative-not mine,” he says. “If there’s people spying on me, that’s fine. When asked about the potential security and privacy risks, Muscaglione says he isn’t worried in the slightest. So, it’s gone from being basically just Chinese to being the preferred app.” “I have a lot of my relatives in Italy that are all using WeChat now because they’ve seen the value of it. “It’s like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all in one,” he says. Muscaglione, 60, says Sicilian family members abroad have also begun to embrace the app for all of its features. So, it’s really valuable to everybody in the Chinatown community and the Asian community in general.” “If there’s ever any kind of crime, it’s instantly shared within the community within minutes. “Within minutes, the whole community knew strictly through WeChat communication even before the local news picked it up,” Joe Muscaglione, who cofounded the restaurant with his business partner Jimmy Li, says. When a waiter at Shanghai Taste, a Shanghainese-style restaurant, was shot 11 times during an attempted burglary in 2021, hundreds of community members in Vegas closely followed the story via local WeChat groups. In Chinatown, Las Vegas, WeChat remains one of the quickest ways to share news and crime alerts. That’s how you feel like you belong,” she says. Lieu, who is half-Chinese and half-Vietnamese, says she feels burnt out from social media but that apps like WeChat bring about a sense of comfort and community for Asian diasporas. The author-who lives in Renton, Washington, about 19 kilometers southeast of Seattle-frequently posts colorful baking creations on her TikTok channel, “ Subtle Asian Baking,” where she has 72,000 followers. If TikTok does get banned or restricted, WeChat-and other Chinese apps-could be next in line. And then there’s WeChat, a company that has openly said it sends user data back to China-and one that the US has already tried to ban in the past. There’s Shein, the fast-fashion brand Temu, the online marketplace and CapCut, a video editing app also owned by ByteDance.

TikTok, which has 150 million active users in the US, has routinely been named the primary target.īut TikTok isn’t the only Chinese tech company with a huge user base in the US. Three proposed pieces of legislation-the DATA Act, the RESTRICT Act, and the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act-all take aim at foreign companies that process Americans’ data.

TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew is due to testify before Congress today. Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden told TikTok that it faces a total ban if it doesn’t sever ties with China. Over the past few months, the US government has been ramping up pressure on Chinese-owned technology companies and, in particular, TikTok, the social video platform owned by Beijing-headquartered ByteDance. “There’s a million different apps, but for those that are not tech savvy … it will be difficult for them to move to another application.” “For my generation, it’s easy enough for us to move on to another app,” he says. (WeChat users outside of China received notifications last year informing them that their personal data, including likes, comments, and search history, would be transmitted back to the People’s Republic.) But Zhou says he’s willing to make the tradeoff between privacy and staying connected to his parents. Zhou, 38, works in project management and mobile app development, and says he’s conflicted about using the app, which is heavily censored and monitored in China. Many of them, like Zhou’s mother, depend on the app to stay connected to family overseas and to the tight-knit Chinese communities in the States. The app has around 19 million daily active users in the US. US-owned messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Signal, are banned in China, so for Zhou’s mother, WeChat-a social messaging and payments platform owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent-has become a lifeline.

#Bytedance chinese tiktok china wechat alipayliaotechcrunch how to

Out of all the messaging apps to choose from, there’s only one his mother feels comfortable using-in fact, it’s the only app she knows how to use. Jimmy Zhou is a New Yorker his mother, in her seventies, moved to the United States from Dongguan, China, in 1982, a few years before he was born.