President Donald Trump on Thursday signed off on an agreement on a TikTok sale he said would bring the app into compliance with U.S. law.
The agreement gets the app one step closer to complying with a 2024 law that forced ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based corporate owner, to sell the platform or have the app banned in the U.S.
“I had a very good talk with President Xi,” Trump said after signing the executive order. “We talked about TikTok, and he gave me the go-ahead. You know, it’s run by American investors, American companies — great ones.”
Under this deal, the U.S. majority-owner groups would receive a copy of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, which White House officials said would be trained with data from U.S. users.
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In response to a question from NOTUS in the Oval Office, Trump said that if he could he would make the new algorithm recommend more right-wing content.
“If I could make it 100% MAGA I would, but it’s not going to work out that way unfortunately,” Trump said. “Every group, every philosophy, every policy will be treated very fairly.”
Trump has changed his posture on TikTok. In his first term, he signed an executive order banning the app in the U.S. While this ban never took effect, it became the basis for the bipartisan bill that Congress passed in early 2024 ordering TikTok to be sold to a new owner without ties to the Chinese government.
During the 2024 election, Trump changed his position on TikTok and became a strong opponent of banning the app. Trump’s support for the platform has only grown over time. He extended an enforcement pause on the law that forced the sale of TikTok four times, even though he lacked the clear legal authority to do so. Earlier this year the White House created a TikTok account, and since has posted more than a hundred videos to it.
Vice President JD Vance said that this deal meets the national security requirements of Congress’ 2024 law, while keeping TikTok available in the U.S.
“The fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating, but we also wanted to make sure that we protected American’s data privacy as required by law,” Vance said.
“This deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok, but actually use it with more confidence than they have in the past because their data is going to be secure and it’s not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens,” he added.
“Under the terms of this deal, TikTok will be owned by a majority of American investors and controlled by a board of directors with extensive national security and cybersecurity credentials,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
Leavitt added that Oracle, whose co-founder Larry Ellison has been a close ally of Trump, would be in charge of the TikTok’s data and cybersecurity.
“The algorithm will be secured, retrained and operated in the U.S. outside of ByteDance’s control,” Leavitt said, adding that TikTok would remain interoperable globally.
For years, congressional Republicans have raised concerns about the danger of covert content manipulation on TikTok by the Chinese government, which often exerts influence over companies like ByteDance, the company that currently owns TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm.
TikTok’s U.S. user data is stored in Oracle servers located in the U.S., but Chinese ownership of TikTok has raised concerns among China hawks in Washington who worry that Chinese intelligence could retain access to massive amounts of U.S. users’ data.
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Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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