After years of heated debate, international negotiations, and legal wrangling, TikTok’s fate in the United States appears to be entering a new chapter. On September 19, 2025, President Donald Trump announced a preliminary agreement that would see Chinese tech giant ByteDance sell a majority stake in its wildly popular video platform to a group of U.S. investors. The arrangement, hammered out after high-level talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, has set in motion a complex process expected to conclude by January 22, 2026, pending approvals from both Chinese and U.S. authorities, according to a memo to employees from TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.
The deal is designed to bring TikTok into compliance with a U.S. law signed by President Joe Biden on April 23, 2024, and later upheld by the Supreme Court on January 17, 2025. The law mandated that TikTok’s U.S. operations be placed under American control or face a nationwide ban—a move that sent shockwaves through the tech industry and ignited a firestorm of political debate. At the heart of the controversy lies TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, the secret sauce behind its addictive "For You" page. As The Conversation reported, this algorithm is widely seen as the app’s engine, anticipating users’ content preferences with uncanny accuracy. “Buying TikTok without the algorithm would be like buying a Ferrari without the engine,” one analyst quipped.
But the Chinese government, citing national law, has made clear it will not allow ByteDance to sell the algorithm outright, classifying it as a controlled technology export. Instead, the new deal will see the algorithm licensed to the U.S. entity, keeping it as Chinese intellectual property while allowing continued use in America. This compromise, though, has done little to quell concerns about foreign influence or transparency. As Bloomberg Opinion’s Dave Lee argued, the arrangement “does little to address the core concern and the reason any of this started in the first place, which was the worry over China’s stewardship of a recommendation algorithm that influences more than 170 million American users.”
Under the terms of the proposed joint venture, ByteDance will retain a 19.9% ownership stake—the maximum allowed under U.S. law—while the remaining 80% will go to American investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz. Oracle, in particular, will play a pivotal role, overseeing the retraining of the algorithm on U.S. user data and monitoring its operation. The U.S. government, for its part, will be allowed to select one board member, giving it a direct line into the platform’s governance.
Yet questions linger about what exactly Oracle brings to the table. While its shares jumped 7.5% on December 19, 2025, after the announcement, critics point out that Oracle’s expertise in social media algorithms is, at best, unproven. “What expertise Oracle offers in social media algorithms is not clear. Nor is what power it would have to forensically alter ByteDance’s code and how it is applied to American users,” Lee observed. Some have suggested that Oracle’s involvement could help detect manipulation at scale, but as Professor Sarah Kreps of Cornell University noted, “it remains unclear how effectively it constrains subtler forms of influence or ensures sustained accountability.”
For everyday users, the immediate experience may not change much—at least not right away. The U.S.-only version of TikTok will continue to use the same core algorithm, but it will be retrained exclusively on American user data. This means the content recommendations will increasingly reflect U.S. cultural preferences, values, and behaviors. As explained in The Conversation, TikTok’s algorithm optimizes for four goals: “user value,” “long-term user value,” “creator value,” and “platform value.” It does this by analyzing proxy signals such as likes, comments, shares, follows, and time spent on videos, using machine learning to predict which content will keep users engaged and coming back for more.
But the new ownership structure could have far-reaching consequences for the app’s evolution. With Oracle and the U.S. government overseeing the algorithm’s retraining, there’s potential for significant influence over what kinds of content are promoted—or suppressed. Content moderation, which has already been a flashpoint in debates over free expression and misinformation, will now be firmly in American hands. President Trump himself indicated earlier this year that the U.S. could “police” moderation on the platform “a little bit, or a lot.” This has sparked concerns among users and civil liberties advocates about the potential for government overreach and political bias in deciding what speech is acceptable.
Indeed, the perception of TikTok as a venue for protest, activism, and open discussion may shift as a result. Users, especially younger ones, have grown wary of the government’s increasing role in shaping online discourse. Will TikTok remain a space for dissent and debate on issues like immigration, war, and political scandal? Or will new guidelines and oversight chill the vibrant, sometimes chaotic, conversations that have defined the platform?
The shifting ownership could also impact TikTok’s competitive position. The more complicated structure may slow progress on new features, such as TikTok Shop, its burgeoning e-commerce platform. There are fears that the U.S. version may lose out on ByteDance’s investments in artificial intelligence, potentially allowing rivals like Instagram’s Reels to gain ground. As Lee pointed out, “The more complicated ownership structure might slow progress on developing the US version of TikTok, putting it at greater risk of being overtaken by Instagram’s Reels.”
Meanwhile, critics question whether the deal truly addresses the original national security concerns that prompted the sale-or-ban ultimatum. The law that forced ByteDance’s hand was passed hastily, some argue, amid worries—never substantiated with concrete data—that TikTok’s algorithm was amplifying certain political narratives after the October 7, 2023, terror attack. The challenge, as Lee notes, is that “when everyone’s TikTok ‘for you’ page can be vastly different, it’s nearly impossible to take a data-driven approach to understanding what is being funnelled to the nation’s eyes and ears, and how.”
Others point out that American social media giants aren’t exactly paragons of transparency themselves. Meta, for example, recently shut down a program that allowed researchers to monitor the most shared posts, while Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has made it prohibitively expensive for outside experts to study the flow of information on its platform. The key difference, according to Lee, is that “when those companies do wrong, their bosses are answerable to US law and often find themselves in front of Congress to be held accountable.”
As the January 22, 2026, deadline for finalizing the deal looms, it’s clear that the TikTok saga is far from over. The arrangement may satisfy the letter of the law and remove the issue from the immediate political agenda, but it leaves unresolved questions about influence, accountability, and the future of digital expression in the United States. As the story continues to unfold, TikTok’s millions of American users—and the broader tech world—will be watching closely to see how this unprecedented experiment in algorithmic governance plays out.
