(Pierre, SD) — South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is banning the China-based tech company Tencent from state devices after signing an executive order Thursday.
Tencent, which owns the popular chat app WeChat, the website Discord and various game companies, is used by one-point-three billion people across the world. According to Noem’s office, the company poses similar cybersecurity risks to the state as TikTok. Noem banned TikTok and ByteDance from state devices in November of 2022.
Under the order, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Information and Telecommunications will have the power to ban “any other application, website, platform, service, or product whose use or access would be detrimental to state security in the same way as Tencent and Bytedance.”