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TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said it has finalized a deal on Thursday to set up a majority American-owned joint venture company to avoid a U.S. ban on the popular short video app used by more than 200 million Americans.
The deal is a milestone for the video-sharing app after years of battles that began in August 2020, when U.S. President Donald Trump first tried unsuccessfully to ban it over national security concerns.
The new app will operate under “defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users,” the company said in a statement Thursday.
The agreement provides for American and global investors, including cloud computing giant Oracle, private equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, to hold a stake of 80.1 per cent in the new joint venture, while ByteDance will retain 19.9 per cent.
A White House official told Reuters that the U.S. and Chinese governments had signed off on the deal. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment.
Details of the deal are in line with those outlined in September, when Trump delayed enforcing a law that would ban the app unless its Chinese owner sold it.
Former TikTok figures Adam Presser and Will Farrell have been appointed CEO and chief security officer respectively. The board of directors for the joint venture includes TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew, who will lead TikTok’s global businesses and strategy.
Wide bipartisan majorities in Congress passed a law (signed by then-president Joe Biden) to ban TikTok in the U.S. if it did not find a new owner in place of China’s ByteDance. The platform was set to go dark based on the law’s January 2025 deadline. For a several hours, it did.
But on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order to keep it running while his administration sought an agreement for the sale of the company.
The Trump administration extended the deadline multiple times. Meanwhile, Trump himself credited TikTok with helping him win the 2024 election. He has more than 16 million followers on his personal account.
U.S President Donald Trump has signed an executive order outlining the terms of a deal to sell TikTok’s American operation to a group of stateside investors. For The National, CBC’s Ashley Fraser breaks down the deal and what it could mean for the social media platform’s algorithm.
The White House launched its own TikTok account last year.
The Canadian government ordered TikTok to close its Canadian operations in November 2024 following a review of ByteDance, citing unspecified “national security risks.”
Canada has not banned the app for users.
Law professor Kristen Thomasen says preventing the sharing of non-consensual deepfakes on X will likely require government legislation, warning it’s a structural issue that users have limited means to solve.
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