TikTok Deal: All the Neuroses, But Hold the CCP?

Can the nation’s youth have hope for a new lease on life for dangerous fads, make-up confessionals, and bad dance routines? And can the rest of us hope for a future in which China’s intelligence services don’t hitch a ride on all of the devices that run that platform?

Perhaps. The US and China have reached a deal where TikTok transfers ownership for US operations to new owners. While that sale won’t include control of TikTok’s current algorithm, it will include a duplicate that will replace it:

The future of TikTok in the U.S. is coming into focus, and users likely won’t have to download a new app to access it.

After months of negotiations between the Trump administration and China over the U.S. operations of the popular short-form video app, the two sides have a preliminary deal. Under the agreement, existing investors and a group of new U.S. backers that includes private-equity firm Silver Lake and cloud-computing firm Oracle would together own about 80% of the company.

A new version of TikTok’s content-recommendation algorithm would be retrained and, crucially, users would be able to access the service via the same app they have been using. President Trump is expected to approve the framework via an executive order declaring that it satisfies the requirements of the law later this week, according to a senior White House official. The official confirmed the contours of the deal that were reported in The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets last week.

How exactly would this duplicate algorithm work? Supposedly, Beijing will agree to give access to the original algorithm code as a limited license, but not for direct use. The duplicate could then be modified to cut out any CCP access to the data or the users, presumably using Oracle software engineers to ensure this. Larry Ellison and Oracle would then control access to user data, thus solving the national-security issue within TikTok.

However, that would only apply to users within the US. Left unresolved, as CNN points out, is how Oracle can integrate into the global TikTok platform without a Beijing back door:

Under the deal, the new ownership group will receive a copy of the algorithm code from ByteDance, review it and retrain it on US user data. Oracle will continuously monitor how it’s pushing content to users, according to the senior White House official.

The new ownership group will control the algorithm only for US users — again raising the question about whether American users will have to download a new, separate app after the deal is complete.

The deal will expand Oracle’s involvement with TikTok, building on an existing partnership with ByteDance to store TikTok’s US user data domestically as part of an earlier effort to address national security concerns. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison is also close with Trump.

Perhaps system architecture experts can explain this, but how exactly can US users engage the global platform without engaging the CCP-linked global algorithm? How can the current app in the US still work to prevent Beijing from accessing the data? None of this makes much sense, but again, if anyone can figure out how to filter requests to a massive relational database and shield it from penetration, one would assume that it would be Oracle and its engineers. 

Will this satisfy the law Congress passed and Joe Biden’s puppeteer signed that bans TikTok unless placed under American ownership? Maybe, but the connection to the international platform will have to get explained a lot more carefully. There aren’t too many system architects or experts on relational databases in Congress, after all. 

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