After delaying a US-imposed ban on TikTok earlier this year, the Trump Administration has a new plan to keep the wildly popular short-form video platform in the US.
The yet-unannounced plan would be to create a new company, called “TikTok America” and divvy ownership up in a way that favors US investors. TikTok America would be 50% owned by new US investors, 30% by existing investors, and 19.9% by ByteDance, the company that created TikTok.
As The Information points out, it’s not clear whether or not the Chinese government has agreed to this plan. It’s also unclear what Bytedance thinks of the idea.
Details are presently slim, and there are just a few days before the temporary reprieve ends. Currently, there’s no word on who the proposed US investors would be. Amazon placed a last-minute bid on the service in recent hours, and it remains to be seen how that will be taken.
The TikTok saga is a long one that began in mid-2020, under the Trump administration.
For the next few years, notably the first half of President Biden’s administration, it seemed as though the TikTok ban was off the table. Then, in April 2024, Biden signed a law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok ownership to a US buyer within nine months.
Days before the ban was set to take effect, and after using the service to help drive him to the presidency, then President-Elect Trump promised Americans TikTok would continue operating in the US.
After the ban took effect on January 19, Trump kept his promise. He officially ordered the ban to not be enforced on January 20, the day he took office.
