The White House has unveiled the details of a corner deal that would give American companies control over TikTok’s important algorithm and hand the maturity of board seats for its US operations to Americans.
Press clerk Karoline Leavitt said the agreement could be inked “ in the coming days, ” although China has yet to note.
Washington has been pressing for times to separate TikTok’s US arm from its Chinese parent company ByteDance over public security enterprises. The app was told to vend its American operations or threat being banned, but President Donald Trump constantly extended the deadline, most lately pushing it back to December.
Under the new deal, tech mammoth Oracle, chaired by billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison, will oversee TikTok’s US data and sequestration operations. “ The data and sequestration will be led by one of America’s topmost tech companies, Oracle, and the algorithm will also be controlled by America as well, ” Leavitt told Fox News.
Ellison’s son David, who lately bought media mammoth Paramount, which owns CBS News, is also set to come a major player in the platform’s future.
Trump said on Friday that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had approved the deal during a phone call, describing it as “ productive ” on Truth Social. Beijing has not verified that agreement.
China’s Commerce Ministry issued a more conservative statement, saying it admired companies’ wishes to negotiate “ in agreement with request rules ” and in line with Chinese laws. State news agency Xinhua also left the outgrowth unclear, quoting Xi as saying Beijing “ welcomes accommodations over TikTok. ”
One of the biggest sticking points has been power of the algorithm that powers content for TikTok’s 170 million US druggies. Asked in the UK on Thursday whether an American buyer would have to make a new algorithm, Trump dodged the question while standing next to British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Trump formerly pledged to ban TikTok entirely but latterly embraced the app to reach youngish choosers during his successful 2024 presidential run. In January, the US Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok unless ByteDance vended off its US operations. The app briefly went “ dark ” before the ban was delayed.
The Justice Department has constantly advised that TikTok’s access to US stoner data poses a public security trouble of “ immense depth and scale. ”
