It turns out that Donald Trump’s best solution to an app-driven China softpower incursion into US culture isn’t a full, unequivocal severing of TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Instead, it’s the sale of a majority stake of a cluster of staff and assets representing TikTok’s business inside the United States, subject to restrictions placed on the sale by Chinese law.
At a press conference this afternoon, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving the sale of a majority stake in TikTok’s U.S. arm from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to a consortium of largely Trump-aligned American investors.
The forced sale has been years in the making, following scandals revealing that American TikTok users’ private information was freely accessible by ByteDance employees in China, and that some of those employees used the app to spy on Forbes journalists in an effort to shut down whistleblowers leaking about the company. But at the press conference, Trump and other White House officials left key questions unanswered about what the deal will actually look like. (Vice President J.D. Vance said that more information about the deal will be released “in the days to come.”)
One of those unanswered questions is what will happen to the other apps that ByteDance owns and operates in the United States. Those apps are covered by the same law that required ByteDance to sell TikTok or see it banned in the U.S. — and they are immensely popular. CapCut, a popular video editing app, has more than 1 billion downloads in the Apple Play store, and Gauth, a homework help app for kids as young as 4 years old, is currently the top-rated education app in the Apple App Store and once claimed it has helped more than 200 million students. (The app stores do not break out downloads by region but CapCut was a significant enough part of ByteDance’s U.S. portfolio that the company planned to build a U.S.-specific version of the app, just in case it did become part of a sale.)
For the last nine months, President Trump has ordered his Department of Justice to ignore the law that would ban those apps, while he has attempted to broker a forced sale of their better known sibling. If the apps are not part of a deal, though, a question remains about whether Trump will continue to disregard Congress’s mandate, or finally enforce a ban that would end their presence in the United States. Neither the White House nor ByteDance responded to a question about the fate of the apps by press time.
Vice President J.D. Vance said at the press conference that “this deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok but actually use it with more confidence than they had in the past because their data’s going to be secure and it's not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens.”
But some skeptics have worried that the deal might not fully address either data privacy issues or the threat of propaganda. The deal will likely help with the first of these problems, at least going forward — so far as we know, ByteDance will not have access to TikTok users’ information after a sale goes through. But White House officials have said nothing about what will happen to the trove of data ByteDance has already amassed about TikTok’s users, and they have made inconsistent statements about who will control what when it comes to the platform’s recommendations engine.
The law says that after a sale, the new TikTok (and any other apps spun off in a sale) should have “no operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” But the recommendation algorithm that runs TikTok’s For You page will not be among the assets transferred in the sale: ByteDance will continue to own the algorithm, and the new U.S. TikTok will buy a license to use it.
In software development, there are many types of licenses. Some are quite open, allowing the licensee to take the licensor’s code and do with it what they will. Others restrict how much, or what parts, of the code can be changed. We still don’t know what kind of license we’re talking about here.
To follow the law, the forced sale must be what Congress deemed a “qualified divestiture.” But Congress left it up to the president to determine whether a given sale meets that bar — a point that proponents of the deal have cited repeatedly in recent days. (“It’s up to him! What he says goes!”) Skeptics of the deal have questioned whether it will adequately sever the relationship between New TikTok and ByteDance, especially given that Trump instructed his Department of Justice to ignore the law for the first nine months of his presidency.
Trump was for a TikTok ban before he was against it. In fact, during his first term in office, he was the first president to demand that ByteDance sell off U.S. TikTok or see it banned in the U.S. President Joe Biden eventually also adopted that position, and Congress overwhelmingly passed a law reflecting it. It was only after that law was passed, and Trump was running for reelection, that he reversed his position on the app, promising that he would “save TikTok” from the law that might ban it.
Trump’s sale announcement comes at a moment of unprecedented media consolidation. In recent months, the Trump Administration has sought to exert control over the media through a slew of lawsuits and legal approvals that have historically been nonpartisan. Earlier this year, CBS News parent Paramount merged with Skydance, a media firm founded by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison. (Oracle is among the firms set to take ownership of U.S. TikTok under Trump’s forced sale.) To complete the merger, Paramount needed approval from the Trump Administration’s FCC. In the days before receiving that approval, it cancelled the show hosted by comedian Steven Colbert (who often makes fun of Trump), in a move that the comedian and his longtime comedic partner, Jon Stewart, questioned as an attempt to ingratiate the network to the President.
Last year, Trump sued ABC News (which is owned by Disney), arguing that it had defamed him when a commentator on the network characterized a civil judgement against him for sexual abuse of write E. Jean Carroll as rape. Though Trump’s case against the network was weak, it chose to settle anyway, paying the president-elect $15 million. Last week, in response to a veiled threat from FCC Chair Brendan Carr, ABC News suspended the comedian Jimmy Kimmel (another frequent Trump satirist). Trump cheered the suspension, stating (in apparent violation of First Amendment law) that networks should lose their licenses if they were too critical of him.
Against this backdrop, commentators now fear that the Trump TikTok deal is an effort by the president to ensure that yet another media company will be controlled by his political allies. The investors set to take control of TikTok’s U.S. operations may include Ellison’s Oracle, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Lachlan Murdoch of Fox News leadership. If they remake TikTok to reflect their politics like Elon Musk has remade X, they could dramatically reshape a key organ of American discourse.
At the press conference, Trump said he would make the content on the platform “100% MAGA if I could, but it’s not going to work out that way, unfortunately.”
It’s unclear whether TikTok’s new leaders will attempt to change its politics. Doing so would likely anger users, and potentially spook advertisers and depress revenue. Companies can only tweak the mix of views on their platforms so much before their viewers begin abandoning them.
After a trove of Disney+ cancellations and a TikTok trend of Disney superfans condemning the company, Jimmy Kimmel resumed his nightly show on Tuesday.