Will Trump’s TikTok deal keep out China?

After months of teasing an announcement, President Donald Trump on Thursday finally put his Sharpie signature on an executive order to bring the social media platform TikTok under American control.

As the president remarked on the order in the Oval Office, the White House’s own TikTok account posted a short collage of movie clips with the caption, “TikTok is saved.”

Trump’s order brings the administration closer to enforcing a 2024 law meant to force Chinese-based ByteDance to divest from TikTok or see the app banned in the United States. The new system will feature multiple American companies all sharing a stake in the app, refiguring it for American use, and filling seats in a seven-member board of directors. Yet some experts warn the decision may do little to alleviate concerns about protecting American user data.

“It’s going to be as secure as you could be because of the ownership and the people,” Trump said Thursday. “And they have a big investment, you know, it’s to their advantage to make sure it’s good and safe.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who led negotiations, said the planned joint venture will be valued at $14 billion. He said American investors will now control TikTok’s algorithm. While the White House has not yet released the full details of confirmed investors, Trump said Fox Corp., Oracle, and Dell Technologies will all play a role.

“This deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok but actually use it with more confidence than they had 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,” Vance said at the Oval Office signing event.

The White House said the deal complies with the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the 2024 law that required ByteDance to divest from the app. Congress passed the legislation after both Democratic and Republican lawmakers worried that the Chinese Communist Party was spying on Americans and misusing TikTok user data. Although the Supreme Court upheld a challenge to the law in January, Trump has four times delayed its implementation. Thursday’s order directs the attorney general to further delay implementing the law for another 120 days.

“President Trump has used executive discretion all year to delay the enforcement of this law to allow time to come up with a deal,” Wes Hodges, the acting director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person, told WORLD. “There’s been a wide amount of tolerance on the right for this kind of discretion to get a favorable outcome. If that happens, all will be forgiven.”

But the new deal does not completely elbow out ByteDance. While Oracle will receive a licensed copy of the TikTok algorithm to “retrain” for the American version of the app, ByteDance will still control the original algorithm and keep up to a nearly 20% stake in the company.

“I know the president loves a good deal when he can get one,” said Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Sobolik. “This does not make that mark.”

Along with retaining a stake in TikTok, ByteDance may also nominate one person to serve on the seven-member board. The White House did not confirm whether China’s representative will be involved in the company’s security and privacy decisions. The rest of the panel will be made up of Americans, one of them nominated by the U.S. government. The executive order specifies this will be Attorney General Pam Bondi or a designee.

“I think it’s a reasonable accommodation to say if you own 19% of the company, you can have a board seat,” Hodges said. “It doesn’t raise flags for me so long as that board member is excluded from security meetings and anything that would put American user data in danger and threaten our national interests.”

In 2020, Trump defended banning the app and issued an executive order urging the United States to “take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security.” During the Biden administration, the government banned employees from downloading TikTok to federal phones due to security risks. But Trump reversed course by 2024, when his reelection campaign used the app to reach young voters. Roughly 170 million Americans have TikTok accounts.

“Especially the young people, they really wanted this to happen. They did not want TikTok to close,” Trump said during the signing. He added that he did not believe the platform presented national security concerns but was working on the deal to comply with the federal law anyway. The order specifies that American companies will intensely monitor the TikTok algorithm for safety.

ByteDance has denied it uses American data for nefarious purposes. However, under Chinese law, any company based in China must cooperate with information requests from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and assist state security agencies when asked. There have been at least two reported cases of TikTok being used to monitor the location of Americans.

Sobolik with the Hudson Institute told WORLD that China’s manipulation of TikTok is subtle. Copying a license might not safeguard users from that control.

“If the algorithm is licensed, it won’t be controlled,” he said. “If ByteDance doesn’t control the algorithm anymore, then why do we still need intense monitoring from trusted security partners?”

Allowing American companies to retrain and control the U.S.-based algorithm should in theory remove ByteDance from influencing the app’s operation. But exactly how that will work in practice remains murky.

“If the retraining and monitoring are for the purpose of weeding out any pre-existing Chinese bias, then this is a good path,” Hodges said. “If their definition of ending the operational relationship allows a Chinese entity to continue to affect the algorithm, then this is bad news. It’s still hard to determine which [this is].”

Trump said he did not think there would be any operational link between ByteDance engineers and the American version. His order says operation of the algorithm and content-moderation decisions will be fully controlled by the new joint venture.

Still, Hodges said investors and users should wait to learn more details from the White House.

“I would caution the buyers that, before they put in hundreds of billions of dollars, to make sure that what they’re buying they can actually own rather than be remotely turned off the next time we have a spat with the CCP,” Hodges said.