Each of these moves represents a significant break from the traditional relationship the US government has had with private industry. But none has as much potential to affect the daily life of average Americans as Trump’s proposed plan to transfer ownership of TikTok from its current parent, the Chinese company ByteDance, to a group of US investors.
Trump signed an executive order approving the deal in September from the Oval Office, surrounded by members of his administration, who praised the plan for securing data, protecting privacy and guarding TikTok’s US-based users against foreign propaganda, while also yielding billions of dollars for American investors.
There was less discussion of the key role Trump’s own administration would play in the operation of a video-sharing app used by about half of all Americans. But that control seems to be a central part of the deal. Along with Oracle, the US government would work on a new US-tailored version of TikTok, ensuring safety and data security, training the algorithm that determines which videos appear in users’ feeds and inspecting its source code, according to a senior White House official who briefed reporters on the arrangement in an email.
The order that Trump signed to advance the deal also states that “the Attorney General shall receive any information from the new joint venture” and that “trusted security partners may also share information with other United States Government officials,” suggesting the potential for the administration to gain significant access to user data.
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Final terms continue to be worked out and would require approval from the Chinese government, which has yet to endorse the plan publicly. The delicacy of the situation was underscored last week when Trump responded to recent Chinese export controls by threatening new tariffs and suggesting he wouldn’t go ahead with a planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In April, a similar fight over tariffs scuttled a version of this same deal.
If Trump’s proposal does move forward, the president and his allies could have extraordinary leeway to influence everything from TikTok’s content moderation practices to how it handles law enforcement requests about its users — giving the US government the kind of vast powers over the platform that other social media giants have traditionally pushed back against. TikTok didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Politically motivated
See also: Trump signs TikTok order with US app valued at US$14 bil
Social media has been intertwined with US politics for at least a decade, but Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover of Twitter demonstrated how much politically motivated ownership can influence the character of a platform. Musk scrapped the company’s hands-on approach to moderation, allowing content that it had previously considered impermissible misinformation and harassment. He also used the service, which he renamed X, as a political bullhorn to support Trump’s campaign. After Trump was re-elected, Meta Platforms also changed its speech policies in ways that were more in line with the incoming administration; CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the changes better reflected his personal views on content moderation.
Trump, characteristically, has been open about his desire to have the new TikTok favour his own political views, though he’s also suggested he won’t press the issue. “If I could make it 100% MAGA (Make America Great Again), I would,” he said from the Oval Office on Sept 25. “But it’s not going to work out that way, unfortunately. Everyone’s going to be treated fairly — every group, every philosophy, every policy will be treated very fairly.”
Such promises are unlikely to ease concerns about Trump’s influence on one of the country’s most important social networks. Government officials are already targeting speech they don’t like by monitoring social media, filing lawsuits and using regulatory power, as when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr threatened in September to punish Walt Disney’s ABC if it didn’t remove American television host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel from the air. “The federal government will have as much power, if not more, over this new TikTok entity than the FCC does over Disney,” says Jim Secreto, a former Treasury Department and national security official who helped shape the Biden administration’s approach to TikTok. The platform, he says, is “incredibly valuable in terms of cultural capital, politics, and just controlling the information that Americans see.”
TikTok’s popularity
The immense popularity of the Chinese social media app in the US has worried officials since the first Trump administration. Beijing asserts control over privately owned Chinese companies in various ways and, under Chinese law, can compel ByteDance to hand over TikTok data for national security reasons. The company maintains that it hasn’t been asked for such data and that it wouldn’t provide it if asked. But US officials have expressed fear that TikTok could be used to gather sensitive information about Americans — something ByteDance has admitted to doing in regard to US- and UK-based journalists and its own employees — and that TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm could be used to manipulate political and social discourse. Some third-party research has found that TikTok already shows its US users less “anti-China” content than rivals.
Such fears inspired Congress to pass a bipartisan law last year that required ByteDance to spin off the app’s US operations or face a nationwide ban. Trump has been a harsh critic of TikTok in the past — he threatened to shut it down in 2020 if ByteDance didn’t divest — but more recently has come to support the app, which he’s said helped him win the 2024 election. He’s delayed enforcement of the ban five times already, giving ByteDance an extra year to ink a deal.
The president’s plan to save TikTok involves selling a majority of the app’s US business to predominantly American investors; ByteDance would maintain a small stake and share in the profits. In the past, Trump has suggested he wants the US government to have some kind of stake in the US TikTok, though a senior White House official more recently told reporters it wouldn’t, nor would the entity have a board member handpicked by the US government.
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Politics meets ownership
Still, the TikTok deal is stacked on all sides with Trump allies likely to influence the app. That includes billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a Trump friend and longtime Republican donor whose software company was given the highly lucrative assignment of securing the new TikTok venture. Trump has also said the Murdoch family, which helms the media empire behind Fox News, is among its investors.
Vice President JD Vance, whose team ran point on the dealmaking process, has emphasised that handing over TikTok to long-standing, reputable American institutions such as Oracle, which has spent years working to safeguard TikTok as its cloud services provider, is precisely what’s needed to give US citizens peace of mind. Doing so, he’s argued, ensures the app approaches issues such as content moderation and algorithm tweaks in the way other private companies do. “We want to make sure that our people and our investors actually make these decisions based on what’s good for their business, as opposed to what’s good for another government’s propaganda arm,” Vance said as Trump signed the TikTok order.
But at a time when Trump has blurred the line between government and commercial power, the administration’s deal to hand ownership of TikTok to private companies is unlikely to convince everyone that the app has been insulated from political influence. “A lot of people are obviously worried about what Xi Jinping might want Americans to see,” says Secreto, the former Treasury official. “But there are also many Americans that might be worried about what Larry Ellison wants them to see.”
