Executive orders banning TikTok, WeChat deepen decoupling from China, broaden scope of security-based actions

President Trump’s executive orders banning social media apps TikTok and WeChat expand the scope of national security-based efforts to remove Chinese products from U.S. markets and systems, taking the cyber and technology battle with China from the network level all the way down into the apps on personal devices.

The bans announced Thursday are “more evidence of a decoupling process that will have significant reverberations for western companies doing business with China,” said one industry source. “In a zero-trust environment...