A Chinese-American lawyer who uses the online name “Silicon Valley Lawyer Zhu” said on YouTube that his WeChat account was permanently banned despite his role in successfully challenging the Trump administration’s 2020 attempt to restrict WeChat in the United States. Screenshots he shared show that his account was marked “login restricted and cannot be unblocked” for allegedly committing multiple violations. The lawyer said Tencent did not specify which rules he had violated or who had reported him, and he speculated that the ban may have been related to his criticism of China’s COVID-19 lockdown policies.
In August 2020, the Trump administration issued an executive order seeking to prohibit U.S. transactions involving WeChat, potentially forcing the app out of the U.S. market. Attorney Keliang “Clay” Zhu and four other Chinese-American attorneys subsequently formed the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance and challenged the restrictions in federal court, arguing that they violated the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech. A federal judge issued an injunction blocking the restrictions, and the legal battle continued until the Biden administration revoked the Trump-era restrictions in January 2021.
The lawyer now says that while he helped defend WeChat in the United States on free-speech grounds, his own WeChat account was later permanently banned by Tencent. This shows an apparent ironic contradiction between defending a platform’s access to free expression in the United States and its restrictions on users’ speech under communist China’s censorship system.
Source: Aboluo, August 22, 2026
https://www.aboluowang.com/2026/0822/2424176.html