President Donald Trump has officially signed a deal to transfer ownership of popular Chinese app TikTok to a largely American join venture.
The executive order states, “I have determined that the proposed divestiture would allow the millions of Americans who enjoy TikTok every day to continue using it while also protecting national security.” The join venture will include both Chinese and American companies.
While signing the executive order in the Oval Office, Trump said, “This is interesting because I had a very good talk with President Xi. A lot of respect for him, hopefully he has a lot of respect for me too.And we talked about TikTok.…He gave us the go ahead, and you know, it’s run by American investors, American companies… the biggest.”
President Donald J. Trump and @VP Vance SAVE TikTok from a ban while protecting America’s national security by removing TikTok in the U.S. from China’s control. 🇺🇸
THE ART OF THE DEAL. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/Khl8QRnhNi
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 25, 2025
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The new deal as posted on the White House website says that the new joint venture will be based in the United States, but ByteDance — the Chinese company in which the genocidal, U.S.-hating Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government owns a stake and board seat — and its affiliates will still own somewhat less than 20% of the joint venture. This could present problems down the road as the CCP requires its agents to be in every company in China, and ByteDance has shared data with the CCP upon demand. The Trump executive order states that the USA will be regulating every aspect of the TikTok deal going forward.
Under section 2 are some key and interesting points:
(B) Second, the divestiture puts the operation of the algorithms and code, as well as content-moderation decisions, under the control of the new joint venture.
(C) Third, the divestiture prohibits the storage of sensitive United States user data in a manner that would place such data under the control of a foreign adversary and requires such data be stored in a cloud environment run by an American company.
(D) Fourth, the divestiture includes intense monitoring of software updates, algorithms, and data flows by the United States’ trusted security partners, and it requires all recommendation models, including algorithms, that use United States user data to be retrained and monitored by those trusted security partners.
The data protection is very good news. We do not want the CCP to be able to access all kinds of detailed personal data from users.
The question with this deal is whether or not the algorithm is still in any way under the influence and control of China, which was one of the two big threats with TikTok, since the Chinese government could manipulate content. The executive order makes it clear that CCP-tied ByteDance will be a partial owner, raising questions as to whether the CCP will still be able to manipulate the algorithm, even if it cannot directly access data.
You can read the full executive order, “SAVING TIKTOK WHILE PROTECTING NATIONAL SECURITY,” on the White House website.
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