On Thursday, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to transfer the ownership of the American Operation Tiktok to a group of American investors, including co -founder Oracle Larry Ellison.
“I had a very good conversation with President XI. We talked about Tikktoku. He gave us Ahead,” Trump said during a press conference of the White House. He admitted that he had gained a bit of resistance from the “Chinese side”. Until Thursday afternoon, the Chinese government did not issue an announcement of the recognition of the contract.
Vice President JD Vance said that the contract valued Tiktok for about $ 14 billion. Bytedance was worth $ 330 billion From August. Both Trump and his treasury secretary Scott Bessent Credit Vance as a key role in the mocking of the contract.
Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch belong to “four or five” American investors who will take over US operations Tiktok, according to Trump. “Oracle plays a very important role,” he said at a press conference. Vance said that the full list would be published in “Days To Abe”.
The details of the contract are still unknown. “This agreement ensures that the American subject and American investors actually control the algorithm,” said Vance during the briefing. “We don’t want it to be used as a propaganda tool by any foreign government.”
It is not clear if Bytedance will remain in any way responsible for the action of Tiktok in the USA. Until then, Tiktok bet on Project Texas, a system designed to separate access to US and China’s data to tranquil the concerns related to national security. But a global platform, such as Tiktok, inevitably requires various departments and geographical branches to access data, which means that pure separation is unlikely. For many in Congress and Washington, more broadly, all the involvement of Bytedance in the novel American Tiktok would violate the law. On the other hand, if licensing is essentially a copy of the Bytedance source code, it is hard not to perceive it as a violation of Chinese law.
It is also unclear whether American users will now be forced to migrate to the novel application and whether they will support various content than Tiktok users in the rest of the world.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that there would be no difference. But even if the content pool published on the platform is the same, changes in the recommendation algorithm by nature would mean that users see different things. Tiktok was one of the first social networks in which the content algorithm mostly determines the user’s experience, unlike previous platforms, which give priority personal connections and marked interests. This means that users have less control over what they see on their website.
There are common fears that the Trump administration is willing to armament of the ally control over the media and social media to censor content that does not favor. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who will have a significant role in the novel entity Tiktok, has close connections with the Trump administration. CBS, who is currently owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation by his son David Ellison, recently canceled the latest show, whose host Stephen Colbert is a recurrent critic of Trump.
Asked by the reporter on Thursday whether the contract would mean more content of the magician on Tiktoku, Trump replied: “If I could, I would make a 100% magician algorithm. But this will not be possible. Unfortunately, everyone will be treated fairly.”
This is a developing story. Check updates.