President Trump signed a decree on Thursday that would allow the extremely popular social video application Tiktok to continue working in the United States.
Tiktok’s mother company, Bytedance, had been under pressure to deactivate its property in American application operations or cope with a national prohibition, due to security problems concerning the links of the company with China.
The Congress adopted legislation calling for a prohibition by Tiktok to enter into force in January, but Trump has repeatedly signed orders that allowed Tiktok to continue to operate in the country.
Under an agreement which said that Trump was approved by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Tiktok’s American operations will be operated by a joint venture managed by a group of mainly American investors. Bytedance and its affiliates would hold less than 20% of ownership in the company.
About 170 million Americans use Tiktok, known for its entertaining viral videos.
“These guarantees would protect the American people from the abusive use of their data and the influence of a foreign opponent, while allowing millions of American viewers, creators and companies that rely on the Tiktok application to continue to use it,” said Trump in his executive order.
Trump, who led the push years ago to ban Tiktok from the United States, said at a press event that he thought that the agreement is satisfied with security problems.
“The greatest reason is that it belongs to the Americans … and to the people who love the country and the very intelligent Americans, so they want nothing like it,” said Trump.
Trump said Thursday that people involved in the agreement included the co-founder of Oracle Larry Ellison, the Director General of Dell Technologies Michael Dell and the Rupert Murdoch media magnate. Vice-president JD Vance said that the new entity controlling Tiktok American operations would have a value of around $ 14 billion.
Murdoch’s involvement would probably lead Fox Corp. Investing in the agreement, a source familiar with the question which was not authorized to comment on the Times publicly. Fox Corp. Fox News has, whose opinion hosts support Vocally Trump.
The algorithms and the code would be under the control of the joint venture. The order requires storage of sensitive American user data under an American cloud computing company.
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News last Saturday that data and the privacy of application in the United States would be led by Oracle.
Ellison is an ally of Trump who is the richest second in the world, according to Forbes.
Tiktok already works with Oracle. Since October 2022, “all new protected American user data has been stored in the Secure Oracle infrastructure, not on Tiktok or Bytedance servers,” explains Tiktok on his website.
Ellison also prepares an offer for Warner Bros. Discovery, the media company which owns HBO, TNT and CNN, after having already completed a takeover of Paramount, one of the original Hollywood studios.
“The most important thing is that it protects the security of American data,” said Vance during a press rally on Thursday. “What this agreement guarantees is that the American entity and American investors will really control the algorithm. We do not want this to be used as a propaganda tool by a foreign government. ”
Tiktok, who has a great presence in Los Angeles, did not respond to a request for comments.
The conditions of the agreement are not yet clear. Trump discussed the Tiktok agreement with Xi Jinping in China during an extended telephone call last week. Chinese and American officials have until December 16 to finalize the details.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
