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Trump seeking deal to avoid TikTok ban in US

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TikTok's US algorithm will be outside ByteDance's control,

official says

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Democrats want to know how any deal will work

(Adds detail from source, context throughout, quote from

Democratic lawmaker in paragraph 8, bullets)

By Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - A U.S.-China agreement

on TikTok's U.S. operations includes China's ByteDance choosing

one of seven board members for the new entity, with Americans

holding the six other seats, a senior White House official said

on Saturday.

President Donald Trump is trying to keep the short video app

with 170 million U.S. users from being banned after Congress

passed a law in 2024 that ordered it shut down by January 2025

if its U.S. assets were not sold by owner ByteDance.

Trump has delayed enforcement of the law through

mid-December amid efforts to extract TikTok's U.S. assets from

the global platform, line up American investors and ensure the

new ownership qualifies as a full divestiture needed under the

2024 law.

This week's progress toward a deal marked a rare

breakthrough in months-long talks between the world's two

biggest economies that have sought to defuse a wide-ranging

trade war that has unnerved global markets.

Trump said on Friday that he and Chinese President Xi

Jinping had made progress on a TikTok agreement in a phone call

and would meet face-to-face in six weeks. But Beijing's

statements have not clarified how advanced the progress has

been.

Details of the agreement, as laid out by the senior White

House official, largely align with reporting from Reuters and

other news outlets in recent days. The official said Trump would

extend the latest pause in enforcement of the 2024 law for an

additional 120 days, suggesting the next deadline for an

agreement to be finalized would be in April.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Still, lawmakers will want an explanation about how the deal

will work.

"The devil will be in the details," said Representative

Frank Pallone, a Democrat. "We cannot allow China continued

access to massive amounts of Americans' personal data, and we

cannot allow Trump to hand TikTok over to his tech bro buddies

and turn it into a MAGA mouthpiece. Period."

It is not clear if the deal in its current state will

qualify as a full divestiture as required by Congress under the

2024 law.

Trump has credited TikTok with helping him win re-election

last year and has 15 million followers on his personal account.

The White House also launched an official TikTok account last

month.

The agreement described by the official, as expected, will

require that all data on American users will be stored on U.S.

cloud computing infrastructure run by U.S. software firm Oracle

.

The official also said 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 U.S.

supervision with U.S. data that will not be shared outside of

the United States," the official said.

This is an important point because U.S. officials had warned

in recent years that the algorithm could be used by China to

manipulate what Americans see on social media. Reuters and

others reported this week that the algorithm could be licensed

from ByteDance.

The official said U.S. users would still be able to use

TikTok to interact with content from around the world.

TikTok's U.S. assets would be majority-owned by American

investors and operated in the United States by a board of

directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials,

the official added.

ByteDance's current shareholders include Susquehanna

International Group, General Atlantic, and KKR.

ByteDance would hold less than 20% of the stock of a joint

venture controlling TikTok's U.S. operations, the official said.