Trump will extend the divestment deadline and give ByteDance and U.S. investors 120 more days to finalize a deal.
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order approving a new TikTok U.S. joint venture on Sept. 25, a White House official told The Epoch Times.
The order will extend China-based ByteDance’s divestment deadline for 120 days, giving U.S. investors and ByteDance time to seek regulatory approvals and close a deal.
The TikTok U.S. joint venture will have a new board with seven seats, six of which will be held by Americans with backgrounds in cybersecurity and national security. The seventh will be held by ByteDance, which will be excluded from security-related decisions.
In accordance with the law requiring ByteDance’s divestiture of TikTok, ByteDance will retain a stake of less than 20 percent in the new venture.
The popular social media app has approximately 170 million monthly users, and White House officials anticipate that it will contribute $178 billion to economic development over the next four years.
U.S. cloud company Oracle is among the investors and will serve as the venture’s trusted technology partner, overseeing the app’s source code and security matters.
White House officials have said this means that Oracle will be tasked with taking its copy of the infamous TikTok algorithm, retraining it on U.S. user data, and observing it for any signs of malicious influence.
It is a role similar to the one proposed in TikTok’s “Project Texas” plan, pitched a few years ago, with a key difference being that ByteDance is no longer in charge of code operations and will no longer send U.S. data to China.
Trump had deemed China’s access to TikTok a national security risk in his first administration, ordering an investigation and later issuing an executive order that required ByteDance to sell the app to a U.S. buyer in 2020.
The years-long efforts to secure the app from Chinese influence have seen major developments recently, as U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators met in Madrid on Sept. 15, with a looming deadline of Sept. 17 that would have seen TikTok go dark unless Trump ordered otherwise.
A Chinese export control law covering recommendation algorithms had made selling the app untenable, ByteDance and would-be U.S. investors had said.
On Sept. 19, Trump announced that, following a two-hour call with Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, approval had apparently been given at the highest level.
This means that ByteDance will now need to secure an export license for the algorithm on the Chinese side. On the U.S. side, the venture will likely need to undergo antitrust reviews, officials have said.
