After a yearslong saga, TikTok’s US operations are now under new management.
The $14 billion deal that was signed last month to form the TikTok USDS Joint Venture was finalized late Thursday night after the US and Chinese governments gave it the green light. Moving forward, Oracle, Silver Lake investing, and the Abu Dhabi–based MGX investing will own just over 80% of the company’s US operations, with 19.9% of ownership remaining in the hands of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
Adam Pressler, the former head of operations, trust, and safety at TikTok in LA, was appointed CEO of the joint venture by its board of directors.
In a post to Truth Social not long after the deal was finalized, President Donald Trump wrote that he was “so happy to have helped in saving TikTok,” despite playing a major role in setting off the movement to ban the app with an executive order signed in 2020. After that movement gained bipartisan support, a divest-or-ban law passed under President Joe Biden, was upheld by the Supreme Court, and was subsequently delayed multiple times, per Trump’s orders.
Now, it seems unlikely that TikTok will go dark in the US again—like it did this time last year—but questions remain about what the US TikTok experience will look like for users going forward.
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What now? While at one point there were reports that US TikTok users would need to download an entirely new app, that doesn’t seem to be the case under the new arrangement. American visitors to the app post-deal were greeted with a pop-up notifying them that they would need to agree to new terms of service and a new privacy policy to continue using the existing app. In the pop-up, the company asks users to accept new types of location-based and ads-related data collection terms.
Throughout the sale process, some have expressed concerns about content moderation and censorship, and those concerned about the right-wing shift at CBS News may not be pleased to hear that some of the same investors and friends of the president now control US TikTok. According to a TikTok press release announcing the deal’s completion, American users can expect “robust trust and safety policies and content moderation,” as well as “accountability through transparency reporting and third-party certifications.”
Should the degree of moderation and overall experience change drastically, creators and users could leave TikTok, mirroring the user exodus on X after its ownership change. We can all but guarantee that executives at YouTube and Instagram, which have invested heavily in their own short-form video platforms, are crossing their fingers.
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