U.S President Donald Trump has signed an executive order outlining the terms of a deal to sell TikTok’s American operation to a group of stateside investors.

Washington

The United States and China are close to finalizing a deal that would transfer TikTok's U.S. operations to a consortium of American investors, including several allies of former President Trump. This move follows a 2024 law requiring TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban, due to concerns over potential data sharing with the Chinese government.

Under the proposed arrangement, Oracle and other American investors would control 80% of the new U.S. entity, while ByteDance would retain just under 20%. Oracle would oversee the U.S. version of the app, ensuring data is stored domestically and inaccessible to China. The deal also involves licensing TikTok's algorithm to the new operators, with ongoing questions about how the algorithm may be retrained or altered under U.S. oversight. The agreement has not yet been confirmed by Chinese authorities.

Breaking down Trump’s TikTok deal

So the U.S. and China are close to a deal that would transfer TikTok's U.S. operations to a group of American investors, some Trump allies. The deal could save TikTok in the U.S., but many users are worried, worried about what the new version of the app will look like and whether TikTok's algorithm, its secret source to success, could change. Apparently our government is going to be controlling the TikTok algorithm. We're going to retrain the algorithm. Would you rather have China or the United States controlling what you watch? This is all because of a law that was passed in 2024 that said TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance either divest from its U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban. And this was all over national security concerns where U.S. officials said because ByteDance is based in China, it could share U.S. user data with the Chinese government. That's something that TikTok has said it can't do because its servers are based in the U.S. The idea that the algorithm developed by ByteDance, a Chinese company, is ultimately subject to the influence and input of the Chinese Communist Party and is being served up to hundreds of millions of Americans. Now Trump has extended the deadline for the ban multiple times this year in order to forge a deal with a U.S. company. Sylvia Varner-Murrigan has been following this story for the tech publication The Information. You have the U.S. government essentially facilitating a deal for a group of investors to take over a portion of this business. The Chinese government issuing its approval, this being caught up with trade talks. I think this whole thing is totally unprecedented. In Trump's executive order announcement on Thursday, he outlined that Oracle will play a big part, along with other American investors that will reportedly own 80% of the company under the deal, while ByteDance will keep just under 20% based on the law's threshold. According to White House Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt, Oracle will oversee a new U.S. version of the app. The goal is to ensure the app's data is stored securely in the United States without access from China. There will be seven seats on the board that controls the app in the United States and six of those seats will be Americans. But the critical part to this deal is TikTok's all-important algorithm. ByteDance will make a duplicate of the TikTok algorithm and it will license that to the new operators of TikTok U.S. There are so many questions about what is actually involved in replicating and licensing an algorithm. And all those questions come from what the White House has said about how the algorithm will be retrained and monitored by Oracle, whose chief technology officer and co-founder is Larry Ellison. Trump also said other allies and media moguls could be part of the deal, like... Michael Dell's involved, Rupert Murdoch's involved, probably four or five absolutely world-class investors. The algorithm should, at a high level, function the same way that it originally had. But there's always the possibility that the new owners, following their own interests or at the behest of the U.S. government, might decide to adjust the algorithm in different ways. Kelly Cota says algorithms in general are a critical part of shaping beliefs and attitudes towards different issues in society, especially on TikTok, where 14 million Canadians and 170 million Americans use the app. She says now there are concerns that the U.S. government might have too much involvement in a private company's control over the app. I've seen concerns that there might be sort of an ideological bent to the new ownership. If it's being trained on data from this new app with a U.S.-only population, there's some reason to expect that there could be sort of subtle or small changes. Cota says it will take some time to understand how the algorithm may or may not change under new owners in the U.S. It's also not clear if U.S. users will have to download a separate U.S. TikTok app after the deal is complete. But Canadians will continue to use the global app. And the White House says that under this deal, not yet confirmed by China, U.S. users will still see Canadian content and vice versa.

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Washington County

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New York

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Paris

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Global Tariffs

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Beijing

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Manhattan

Ukraine Invasion

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Dallas

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Los Angeles

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Yangjiang

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West Palm Beach

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Breakdown