A U.S.-China agreement on TikTok’s American operations will allow China’s ByteDance to select one of seven board members for the new U.S. entity, while Americans will hold the remaining six seats, a senior White House official said Saturday. This deal aims to prevent a ban on TikTok in the U.S., where it has 170 million users, following a 2024 law requiring ByteDance to sell its U.S. assets by January 2025.
President Donald Trump has delayed enforcing the shutdown order until mid-December to facilitate extracting TikTok’s U.S. operations from its global platform, securing American investors, and ensuring compliance with the law, which demands a full divestiture. Recent progress marks a rare breakthrough in talks between the U.S. and China to ease ongoing trade tensions. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed the agreement by phone and plan an in-person meeting in six weeks.
The official confirmed Trump will extend the pause on enforcing the law for another 120 days, pushing the deal’s final deadline to April. Under the agreement, all U.S. user data will be stored on American cloud infrastructure operated by Oracle, and TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm will be secured, retrained, and controlled entirely within the United States, away from ByteDance’s influence. This measure addresses U.S. concerns about potential Chinese manipulation through the app’s algorithm, which may be licensed from ByteDance.
Despite these developments, some lawmakers remain skeptical, emphasizing the need for transparency and caution regarding American data security and TikTok’s political influence, with Democrats like Representative Frank Pallone calling for full scrutiny of the deal’s details. It remains unclear if the agreement meets the law’s full divestiture requirement. Trump, who credits TikTok with aiding his 2024 re-election, currently has 15 million followers on the platform, and the White House recently launched its own TikTok account.
