It is now expected that the format or user experience of TikTok in the US and the rest of the world will be different.
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Chinese technology company ByteDance has finally sold most of its US ownership of TikTok to American investors. About half a dozen American investors have bought a total of 80.1 percent of TikTok.
ByteDance now owns only 19.9 percent of the video-sharing platform TikTok. The remaining ownership has been purchased by Silver Lake, Oracle and MGX each with 15 percent, and American investors such as Dell Family Office, Yuri and Julia Milner's Virgo LI. With this, the US TikTok unit has become different from the rest of the country.
The BBC has reported that TikTok's algorithm, which is considered different and influential from other social media platforms, will now be prepared in a new way in the US. Only data from American users will be used in the US unit, and data from other countries will not be mixed. 'This joint venture company, which is majority owned by the US, will operate within the specified security standards, it will pay special attention to the data security of American users, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance,' ByteDance said in a statement.
The new joint venture will be led by CEO Adam Presser and Chief Security Officer Will Farrell, CNN reported. The board of directors of American TikTok is set to include the company's CEO Sou Ji Chiu and Oracle's executive vice president of the secretariat Kenneth Glueck.
ByteDance was banned from the app for a few days in January 2025 for failing to sell its US operations to American investors. TikTok was shut down in the US for a few hours on January 19 last year after the US Supreme Court upheld the US federal government's TikTok law. However, on January 20, the day Donald Trump was sworn in as President, he extended the 90-day deadline for TikTok.
The controversy over TikTok in the US began in 2019. The US had begun to view it as a 'national security threat', particularly over user data protection and its relationship with the Chinese government. During his first term, Trump issued his first executive order to ban TikTok. At that time, he gave ByteDance an ultimatum to sell its US business within 45 days.
After TikTok went to court against the ban, a federal court issued a ‘stay order’ to prevent Trump’s order from being implemented immediately. In 2024, President Joe Biden signed a law called the ‘Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’, giving TikTok nine months to sell its US ownership. If it fails to sell, TikTok will be completely banned in the US from January 19, 2025.
On January 20, just as Trump was taking the oath of office as president, he signed an executive order to postpone the implementation date of the ban on TikTok by 75 days. He postponed the implementation date of the ban a total of four times throughout 2025. More than 170 million users and millions of small businesses in the US are connected to TikTok.
