Vice President J.D. Vance is “confident” that the Trump administration’s TikTok deal will separate the app from its Chinese parent company ByteDance enough to keep U.S. users’ data secure.
The Trump administration insists the deal shifts TikTok’s U.S. operations to American control, though ByteDance would still retain a minority share
Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images
Vice President J.D. Vance is “confident” that the Trump administration’s TikTok deal will separate the app from its Chinese parent company ByteDance enough to keep U.S. users’ data secure.
In a Sunday interview, he moved to assuage concerns about whether TikTok’s U.S. spinoff could be vulnerable to Chinese propaganda or data usage, following news that Oracle $ORCL is set to run its algorithm in America.
“I feel very confident that we have successfully separated this company from TikTok global and actually made it so that we can control people’s data security," Vance told Fox News. “We can ensure that the algorithm is not being used as a propaganda tool by a foreign government.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday approving plans to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. under new ownership. It ended months of uncertainty after the Biden administration last year passed a bipartisan law forcing it to sell the app to a U.S. buyer or face a ban.
Under the terms of the executive order, a new joint-venture will run the U.S. business while ByteDance will have a less than 20% stake. Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi investment fund MGX will be among the company’s investors. Trump has also indicated that Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell $DELL will be part of the takeover group.
ByteDance is set lease its algorithm to the new U.S. entity, and Oracle would then retrain it. The computing giant will also manage a secure cloud containing U.S. users' data, designed to include controls to stop other countries from seeing it.
The arrangement seeks to address a key sticking point for U.S. lawmakers regarding who would run TikTok’s powerful recommendation software, long a security and data privacy concern.
However, ByteDance has not yet acknowledged the executive order or confirmed that the deal is happening. The Chinese government has not yet changed any laws that would allow the deal to take place.
“The way that we’ve set up this deal from a national security perspective is that it’s the American investors and the American businesspeople who will make the determination about what’s actually happening with TikTok,” Vance said.
“At the end of the day, I believe that north of 80% of the company will be owned by the American investors and their partners,” Vance said. “This is not something where the Chinese or any Chinese entity has a large stake of the table.”
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