How is this Americanized TikTok going to work?

President Trump signed an executive order yesterday that paves the way for the short video and advertising company TikTok to be controlled by U.S. interests avoiding Congress's ban.

Here's Vice President J.D. Bans yesterday.

What this deal ensures is that the American entity and the American investors will actually control the algorithm. We don't want this used as a propaganda tool by any foreign government.

TikTok's owner, ByteDance of China, has not acknowledged that this transaction is taking place. For some insight, let's turn to Kelly Cotter, assistant professor of information

sciences and technology at Penn State. Professor, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.

We have to rely on the Trump administration narrative here because we haven't heard from TikTok's

owner bite dance on this, and Chinese officials have been, I will say, vague. Under this plan, what part of

TikTok would get managed by whom? So under this plan, there would be a new U.S. only app that would be

managed largely by U.S. owners. So there will be about an 80% share of U.S. investors, including Oracle,

Rupert Murdoch's company, and some others, and then a less than 20% share for Chinese investors

who are already invested in bite dance.

We should understand that China won't let bite dance sell the prized TikTok algorithm. So I guess it's a new

algorithm. I guess it could be the same, better, or worse. Who would figure that out?

It's not totally clear what this looks like in practice. So it could be something like maybe

bite dance over the source code or maybe it's sort of the whole system that gets handover.

It's not totally clear whether it's like, do we get the recipe for the cake or do we get the

cake?

To understand this better, right, there would be a U.S.-based board overseeing the Americanized TikTok

and, you know, who gets on the board and who chooses who gets on the board is something to watch.

Absolutely.

And then there's also some – the interesting wrinkle that the U.S. government is supposedly going to get something like a finder's fee for orchestrating the negotiations here, which is quite atypical.

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