To Solve The TikTok Problem, Trump Has To Give Up His Control
On Monday, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. and China had “reached a framework” that would enable the Chinese tech giant ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to an American buyer.
The deal, if completed, would mark the end of a nine-month limbo for TikTok, which has stayed online with Trump’s permission despite a law passed by Congress last year requiring ByteDance to sell it or see it banned. It might also mark the end of an unprecedented period of both Chinese and U.S. government leverage over TikTok — but we won’t know that unless and until the government releases details of a deal.
Since January, TikTok has remained online solely because Trump and Xi have allowed it to. If Trump decided tomorrow that the app’s contents were too hostile to his agenda he could order the DOJ to enforce the law and shut the app down. Xi could do the same to ByteDance without the legal niceties, which is why Congress required ByteDance to sell TikTok in the first place.
Lawmakers in Trump’s Republican party have long raised concerns about “jawboning”: government coercion of social media companies to censor or amplify certain speech. Those lawmakers might have been more vocal if a different president gave himself a kill switch for a major speech platform and then tried to force its parent company to sell it to a buyer handpicked by his staff. But jawboning is a threat no matter whether it comes from the Democratic, Republican or Chinese Communist Party.
There is reason for concern that the TikTok deal might give the U.S. government power over speech on the app: it almost happened before.
To eliminate this risk, the TikTok deal will need to end both Xi’s and Trump’s leverage over TikTok. Ending Xi’s leverage will require a full, clean break between TikTok and ByteDance, severing partnerships between the app and its former parent. TikTok will have to either buy or stop using ByteDance’s signature “For You” algorithm, which powers the app’s main feed today. The Chinese government has long said that it won’t allow ByteDance to sell the algorithm. It’s not clear whether that position has changed, but it’s sure to be a topic of discussion when Trump and Xi discuss the deal on Friday.
Ending Trump’s leverage will require keeping any deal fully in the private sector, without giving the government ownership or control over the app, or any special privileges regarding its data or information distribution. Trump wanted to ban TikTok, until he concluded that it helped him win reelection. Across industries, he has tried to negotiate terms that give him ongoing power over private enterprises, from broadcast networks and universities to law firms and, now, tech giants. Asserting that kind of control over TikTok could turn the app into a mouthpiece of a government — ironically, not China’s, but our own.
There is reason for concern that the TikTok deal might give the U.S. government power over speech on the app: it almost happened before. In 2021 and 2022, the Biden Administration tried to make its own deal with ByteDance. In secret, they negotiated an agreement that would’ve given the executive branch the right to inspect TikTok’s data and exercise unprecedented, ongoing power over speech on the platform. After months of talks, the government walked away from the negotiations, and no deal was made. But ByteDance had appeared willing to grant the president wide power over TikTok — a concession it might be willing to make again.
In 2023, as the Biden negotiations entered their last gasps, TikTok’s CEO promised Congress that the app would “not be manipulated by any government.” One might argue that granting the government power over privacy and content policies, as the Biden agreement would have done, would itself be consenting to manipulation. But whatever you call it, TikTok was prepared to cede editorial power to the US government in exchange for US operating privileges.
We don’t know what’s on the table this time. If a deal moves forward, we need to know what’s in it for Trump. Under what circumstances, and for what purposes, will TikTok agree to share data with the government? What involvement, direct or indirect, will the government have in TikTok’s staffing, curation, programming and editorial decisions? ByteDance and the government have now negotiated another deal in secret. The public deserves to know whether Trump and Xi are really turning in their “kill switches.”