Last week, the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove several widely used messaging apps—WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram—from its app store. According to the Wall Street Journal, these apps have about three billion users globally, and have been downloaded more than a hundred and seventy million times in China since 2017. In a statement, Apple said that it was told to remove the apps because of “national security concerns,” adding that it is “obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.” Although new downloads are now blocked, some reports said that Chinese users who had already installed the apps were still able to use them, though doing so requires the use of a virtual private network, or VPN, to get around the country’s “Great Firewall.” Beyond Apple’s allusion to “national security,” why exactly the apps were removed is unclear. An anonymous source told the Journal that the Chinese Cyberspace Administration asked Apple to remove WhatsApp and Threads because both are home to content that includes “problematic mentions” of Xi Jinping, China’s president. The New York Times also quoted a source as saying that the apps were removed because they platformed “inflammatory” content about Xi and violated China’s cybersecurity laws.

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