Trump Executive Order Will Hand TikTok Over to US Investors

Thursday, we President Donald Trump has signed a decree to transfer ownership of Tiktok’s American operation to a group of American investors, including the co -founder of Oracle Larry Ellison.

“I had a very good conversation with President XI. We talked about Tiktok. He gave us the green light,” said Trump at a White House press conference. He admitted that he had obtained a little resistance from the “Chinese side”. Thursday afternoon, the Chinese government had not published an announcement recognizing the agreement.

Vice-president JD Vance said the agreement assessed Tiktok at around $ 14 billion. Bytedance was estimated at $ 330 billion in August. Trump and his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, credited Vance as playing a central role in the brokerage of the agreement.

Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch are among the “four or five” American investors who will take control of Tiktok American operations, according to Trump. “Oracle plays a very big role,” he said at the press conference. Vance noted that the complete list of investors will be published in the “days to come”.

The details of the agreement are still unknown. “What this agreement guarantees is that the American entity and American investors will really control the algorithm,” said Vance during the briefing. “We do not want this to be used as a propaganda tool by a foreign government.”

We do not know if Bytedance would remain in any way responsible for the operation of Tiktok in the United States. So far, Tiktok has bet on Project Texas, a system designed to separate access to data from employees based in the United States and China, to appease national security problems. But a global platform like Tiktok inevitably requires different departments and geographic branches to access the data from each other, which makes its separation unlikely. For many in Congress and Washington, more broadly, any involvement of derivation in the new American Tiktok would violate the law. On the other hand, if the granting of licenses is essentially equivalent to the purchase of a copy of the source code bytedance, it is difficult not to see this as a violation of Chinese law.

It is also difficult to know if American users will now be forced to migrate to a new application, and if they will be served different content from that of 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 displayed on the platform is the same, changes in the recommendation algorithm would intrinsically mean that users see different things. Tiktok was one of the first social networks in which content algorithm massively decides on the experience of a user, unlike previous platforms which prioritize personal connections and self-markers. This means that users have less control over what they see on their page for you.

There are general concerns that the Trump administration is willing to arm its allies on the media and social media to censor the content it does not favor. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle who will play an important role in the new Tiktok entity, has close links with the Trump administration. CBS, which now belongs to Paramount Skydance Corporation of his son David Ellison, recently canceled The late showwhose host, Stephen Colbert, is a frequent critic of Trump.

Questioned by a journalist Thursday if the agreement would mean more Maga content on Tiktok, Trump replied: “If I could, I would do the 100% Maga algorithm. But unfortunately it will not work in this way. Everyone will be treated fairly. “