A coalition of WeChat users in the US sued the Trump administration on Friday, challenging its ban of the messaging app, which they claimed had become an essential digital service for millions of Chinese-Americans.
The complaint, filed in the federal court in San Francisco, claimed the ban breached users’ free speech rights under the First Amendment, as well as being targeted narrowly at a racial group and overstepping the president’s national emergency powers.
Earlier this month Donald Trump turned his sights on the widely used messaging app, which is owned by Chinese tech group Tencent, in an executive order that gave American companies and individuals 45 days to halt “transactions” with the app. The action was made at the same time as a similar order against social video app TikTok, though the latter was later extended to 90 days.