President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order declaring that a proposed deal allowing TikTok to continue operating in the United States after months of uncertainty over the Chinese-owned social media platform. Former president Joe Biden signed legislation last year calling for China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok’s assets to an American company by early this year or face a nationwide ban, but Trump has repeatedly signed orders that have allowed TikTok to keep operating in the US as his administration tried to reach an agreement for the sale of the social media company.
As US President Trump signed the order on the TikTok deal, he said, “This is interesting because I had a very good talk with President Xi, a lot of respect for him. Hopefully, he has a lot of respect for me, too. We talked about TikTok, and he gave us the go-ahead. You know, it’s run by American investors and American companies, great ones, great investors, the biggest. The young people really wanted this to happen. We have American investors taking it over, running it, highly sophisticated, including Larry Ellison and Oracle, I guess, is going to play a very big role in terms of security, safety, and everything else.”
Who owns TikTok in US now?
ByteDance owns TikTok but to remain operational in the US, a majority stake will move to US investors. A group of US investors, including Oracle and Silver Lake, are set to take the new TikTok entity for the US while ByteDance will maintain less than 20 per cent in equity to comply with the divest-or-ban law. ByteDance will be represented by one person on the board, but that individual will be excluded from any security matters or related committees.Much is still unknown about the actual arrangement, but Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping “gave us the go-ahead” to proceed with the deal. Any major change to the popular video platform could have a huge impact on how Americans consume information online. About 43% of US adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, higher than any other social media app, including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published Thursday.Vice President JD Vance said “we wanted to keep TikTok operating” but address security concerns so that “Americans can use TikTok but use it with more confidence than they had in the past.” Young people especially “really wanted this to happen,” Trump said during the signing ceremony.
What made China agree to US deal on TikTok
Beijing once called the demand that TikTok should get a new ownership in the US as an act of robbery but finally Chinese officials changed their stand. Experts believe China might have been able to extract some concessions on the trade front in exchange for the TikTok deal. Others believe China was willing to do so to pave the way for a meeting between Xi and Trump.
