A deal to keep TikTok active in the US past the current deadline of Dec. 16 is likely to happen soon. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports that a deal involving US companies and China could be approved by executive order as early as this week.
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But what will change for US users of TikTok? Who will control the platform, and will the US version of the popular video app be a reboot with a completely new app, or a version of the current one that about 170 million Americans already use?
There are surprisingly few answers for many of those questions, although there seems to be some progress. On Sept. 19, US President Donald Trump spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and said afterward that a deal for US companies to take over the platform’s American operations had China’s blessing. China-based ByteDance owns TikTok.
The US version of TikTok would be controlled by several companies, including Oracle, which reportedly would handle data storage and cloud services and also act as TikTok’s security provider.
But what will people who use TikTok experience during this transition? That’s much less clear.
What could change?
Previous reports suggested that a US version of TikTok would require all users in America to migrate to an entirely new app, and that the new app might not have access to the same content as other countries.
That may no longer be the case. According to The Wall Street Journal, US TikTok users may not be required to migrate after all, and the parties involved may make the transition through an app update.
But the algorithm TikTok uses in the US is likely to change. Bloomberg reports that a new algorithm could be used based on ByteDance’s original version, but rebooted and trained on new data. It’s not yet clear whether existing user data would be merged with data from the new algorithm version or if that’s even possible.
How soon will it happen?
At one point, it looked like a deal might be finalized by the Sept. 19 phone call between China and the US. But instead, the Trump administration pushed back to December a deadline for TikTok to change ownership or shut down. However, if an executive order happens sooner, that could speed things toward a quicker resolution.
