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() President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday signifying that a proposed TikTok deal meets security standards for the U.S.
“Young people really wanted this to happen. They did not want TikTok to close,” Trump said.
Trump said Oracle will be involved and more announcements about American investors would come later.
The deal will allow the app to continue to operate in America.
“There was some resistance on the Chinese side. We wanted to keep it operating and safe,” said Vice President JD Vance. “We think we were able to do that. We’re still working on that, but it’s a big day.”
Trump also noted that Chinese President Xi Jinping has approved the deal.
TikTok coming under US ownership
Under the deal, TikTok in the U.S. will be majority-owned by American interests. It would be run by a new joint-venture company with ByteDance holding less than 20% of the stock.
The new company will be operated by a board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials, with ByteDance choosing only one director of the seven-seat board. ByteDance will also be excluded from the company’s security committee.
Oracle will be the security provider in partnership with the U.S. government, tasked with independently monitoring and assuring the safety of U.S. operations.
That includes data security, source code review and algorithm retraining, along with application development and deployment.
U.S. data will be stored in the country without access from China, on a secure cloud environment built by Oracle.
Technical controls will guard the U.S. systems to provide specific access control of both people and data.
The app will remain globally interoperable for U.S. users, but the content-recommendation algorithm will be retrained from the ground up under U.S. supervision.
TikTok algorithm questions
It is not clear what changes might be made to the algorithm or how it will affect the experience for users. When asked, Trump said people would be treated fairly under the new algorithm.
“If I could make it 100% MAGA that would be great, but no, I can’t do that,” he said.
“Everyone will be treated fairly.”
To allow for the completion of the deal, Trump is extending the enforcement pause for an additional 120 days.