President Trump on Tuesday extended for the fourth time the deadline for when TikTok must be separated from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States, APA reports citing The New York Times.
The extension to mid-December could be Mr. Trump’s last for the video app. He and other officials said this week that they had reached a framework for a deal with China to address national security concerns about ByteDance and its ties to Beijing.
“We have a deal on TikTok,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it.” He is set to speak Friday with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, on Friday to “confirm everything up,” he said.
Details of the framework have begun to emerge. ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, would spin out the app’s American operations into a new company, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Some of TikTok’s largest investors would maintain their stake in the American app, while ByteDance would also bring in new U.S. investors to reduce Chinese ownership to less than 20 percent, the people said.
Oracle, which already provides computing resources for TikTok, is among the investors expected to take a stake in the new business, two other people familiar with the talks said. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, is working to help finance a bid by his son, David, to buy the entertainment giant Warner Bros. Discovery, and some have speculated about whether his son’s growing Hollywood empire might eventually lean on TikTok’s algorithm to better compete with rivals like Netflix.
The list of other potential investors has been in flux, two of the people said. Other entities that have discussed investing in recent weeks include the private equity firm Silver Lake, while General Atlantic and Susquehanna, two firms that are already investors in ByteDance, would roll over their stakes into the new entity, four of the people said.
A senior White House official said that any details of the TikTok framework that were not announced by the administration were “pure speculation.”
The deal would mark an end to a yearslong debate over TikTok’s future in the United States, where its feed of short swipeable videos has captured the attention of more than 170 million users. Who buys and controls the app and its powerful recommendation engine also stands to transform the competitive landscape of American social media.
Congress passed a law with rare bipartisan support last year to force the sale of TikTok, arguing that the app’s ties to China made it a national security threat because Beijing could use it to seek sensitive data on Americans, or to spread propaganda to advance its policy goals. The law, which was supported by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in January.
Mr. Trump delayed enforcement of the law shortly after he took office. His move on Tuesday pushes the deadline for a deal to Dec. 16.
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment on the extension, or on the details of a deal. Neither did Oracle or Silver Lake. Susquehanna and General Atlantic declined to comment.
The framework involving multiple new U.S. investors is similar to one negotiators were closing in on in April. Those discussions were ultimately derailed by trade talks between the United States and China.
It also raises many of the same questions as that deal did — including whether such an arrangement would satisfy the terms of the federal law banning TikTok.
The new owner, for example, won’t get TikTok’s vaunted algorithm — the technology that uncannily figures out what users like and populates their customized feed, according to three people familiar with the discussions. Instead, the U.S. version of TikTok would license the algorithm from ByteDance, they said.
China seemed to confirm that arrangement in an official statement Monday.
The two sides reached an agreement that respects “the will of the business as well as the law of the market on resolving the TikTok issue through such methods as the entrusted operation of TikTok’s U.S. user data and content security business, and the license for use of the algorithm,” the statement said, attributing the comments to a press briefing.
But the law Congress passed requires U.S. TikTok to be cut off from any “operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.”
Lindsay Gorman, a former senior adviser on technology issues in the Biden administration, said that an arrangement would fall short if ByteDance maintained any control over the algorithm.
“Not only does it not satisfy the national security concerns, I don’t believe it satisfies the law,” she said.
She added that the national security concerns could be partially resolved if “the algorithm gets branched off and fully controlled by U.S. entities, and not at all controlled by engineers in China.”
But Anupam Chander, a law and technology professor at Georgetown University, said that this kind of deal might speak to some of the law’s main concerns.
The data collection issue “is addressed with such a significant rupture between Chinese owners and American operations of the new entity,” Mr. Chander said. “It’s hard to imagine how a minority owner of less than 20 percent of the shares could somehow exfiltrate that data, massive amounts of data to China.”
Another point that troubled lawmakers who supported last year’s law was that China could spread propaganda to Americans through the app. Those fears might be subdued for now, Mr. Chander said, but the closed window could open the doors to new kinds of pro-government content.
“It raises the risk of American propaganda by shifting the ownership of this speech platform to American companies who perhaps have a close relationship with the sitting president,” he said.
