THE US operations of TikTok will be majority-owned and controlled by Americans under a deal reached this week to spin off the platform from its Chinese ownership, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, reports Bloomberg.
Speaking on Fox News, Leavitt said yesterday that Americans would hold six of the seven board seats for TikTok and that the video app’s algorithm would be US-controlled. She added the final deal would be signed in the coming days.
The American board members would have national security and cybersecurity credentials and the remaining board member, chosen by current owner ByteDance Limited, will be excluded from the security committee, according to a senior White House official.
Talks earlier this week between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Madrid yielded a framework agreement for spinning off ByteDance’s US TikTok operations. Details of that framework had yet to be made public. President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for TikTok’s divestiture until December 16. Congress passed a bipartisan law requiring ByteDance to divest of TikTok by January 2025.
Trump was once a critic of TikTok but has shifted his views of the app, crediting it with helping him make gains among young voters in last year’s election.
&uuid=(email))