What happened
TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance and a group of investors on Thursday closed a $14 billion deal to create a U.S. version of the popular social video platform. The joint venture, which leaves ByteDance with a 19.9% stake and non-Chinese investors with the other 80.1%, ends years of uncertainty over the platform’s U.S. future. A 2024 law ordered TikTok to sever ties with China by last January or go dark, but President Donald Trump pushed back that deadline five times as his administration sought to broker a deal.
Who said what
The main investors in TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC include Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, each with a 15% stake. Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will lead the new venture as CEO, and Oracle and its partners “will retrain, test and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data,” TikTok said in a press release.
The platform’s 200 million U.S. users “will be able to keep their existing TikTok app,” The New York Times said, but it is “too soon to say” how the “much vaunted algorithm” will change with Oracle overseeing content moderation. Lawmakers forced this ownership change over concerns that China could surveil Americans or spread propaganda. But by shifting ownership to “American companies who perhaps have a close relationship with the sitting president,” Georgetown University law professor Anupam Chander told the Times, “we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda.”
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What next?
“China hawks” in Congress have “vowed to scrutinize the potential deal to ensure it adheres to the law,” Politico said, but Thursday “they seemed prepared to accept Trump’s claim the deal would resolve concerns over national security and control.”
