Americans to hold majority on TikTok board
The US operations of TikTok will be controlled by a majority of Americans, who will hold six of the seven seats on the board, under a deal reached this week.
"There will be seven seats on the board that controls the app in the United States, and six of those seats will be Americans," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News on Saturday.
She added that TikTok’s algorithm will also be controlled by the US, with the final deal expected to be signed in the coming days.
According to a senior White House official cited by Bloomberg, the American board members will have backgrounds in national security and cybersecurity, while the board member picked by current TikTok owner ByteDance will not be allowed to join the security committee.
Trump has been trying to keep the app with 170 million US users available in the US, after Congress ordered it shut down by January 2025 if ByteDance refused to sell its US assets.
He had already delayed the passing of the law three times, trying to obtain the assets and line up with American investors.
On Friday, Trump announced that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had a call regarding the deal, with progress made and a face-to-face meeting expected in six weeks.
It’s not immediately clear from Beijing's statements how significant the progress has been, but the White House official said Trump would extend the current enforcement delay of the 2024 law by an additional 120 days. This would mean the next deadline to reach an agreement will come in April.
The 2024 law calls for a complete sell-off, and it’s still unclear if the deal meets that requirement.
According to the US official, the deal will require that all data on American users will be stored on US cloud computing infrastructure run by US software firm Oracle, according to Reuters.
Additionally, the TikTok algorithm "will be secured, retrained, and operated in the United States outside of ByteDance's control."
"TikTok's content-recommendation algorithm will be retrained from the ground up - reviewed and analyzed under US supervision with US data that will not be shared outside of the United States,” the official explained.
You can read more about the prospects for the deal in our deep dive Trump’s TikTok play: Do we believe a deal has been reached?
