WASHINGTON | Tech giant Oracle will receive a copy of TikTok’s algorithm to operate for U.S. users, according to a senior official in President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday.
Determining next steps for the algorithm, currently owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance, has been one of the most closely watched issues during negotiations over TikTok’s future.
The Trump administration official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the emerging deal, said they believe the plan will satisfy national security concerns over a Chinese company potentially manipulating what is being shown to platform users.
Full details on investors have not been released. However, the official confirmed that Silver Lake, a private equity firm, is part of the investment group.
President Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed bipartisan legislation before leaving office requiring ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok, to sell its assets to an American company or face a ban.
Trump, a Republican, has extended the deadline several times as he worked to reach a deal to keep TikTok available. He spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday.
TikTok should have been banned, as should almost all social media! Algorithms are the silent engines that drive our divisions. It’s no secret that we are divided. Yes, the man at the top is largely to blame, but algorithms keep serving up the same stuff we click on and continue to shape our opinions in a way that we are predisposed to think, if we let them. I’m from Iowa, 20 minutes from Iowa City. I’m a casual sports fan who clicked on a couple of Iowa Football stories. Suddenly I was getting stories about every Iowa team and fewer articles on emerging news stories. I’m inquisitive, and since the Iowa sports blitz was over the top, I dumped my phone “news” app and subscribed to some reputable newspapers, like the Sentinel, AP, and CPR. I avoided Fox because they admitted in their multi-million dollar settlement that they were NOT news, they were an entertainment network. I call the a propaganda outlet. Since using news from Reuters, AP, The Sentinel, CBS, NBC, ABC, The BBC, and others, I am surprised at the information I gather, and that surprise can alter my thinking and, more importantly, change my mind completely! We should all challenge ourselves to learn new things and potentially change our minds. To do otherwise makes us old cranks. I should know, I’m almost 72!