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Wsj: consortium with Oracle will have control of TikTok in the US. Trump: agreement with China. Beijing confirms

US president on Truth: agreement reached "on a 'certain' company that the young people of our country strongly desired to save"

15 September 2025Aggiornato il 15 settembre alle 17.40

Bessent: vicini ad accordo tra Usa e Cina su TikTok

3' min read

Key points

Peking confirmation
A story that began under the Biden administration
The story

3' min read

The White House extends until 16 December the deadline for the sale or ban in the US of TikTok. The extension comes as a framework agreement between the US and China has been reached and is expected to be completed this week with the phone call between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The president said there is a group of large US companies that wants to buy the platform.

TikTok users will be asked to switch to a new app that TikTok is developing and testing, the Wall Street Journal reports, pointing out that Oracle will manage user data at its facilities in Texas. TikTok engineers are recreating a set of recommendation algorithms for the app's content using technology licensed from Bytedance. It was precisely the algorithm that proved to be the most difficult node in the deal because it was considered the most valuable asset.

The US administration was facing a 17 September deadline by which owner ByteDance would have to divest from TikTok's US operations or the app would be shut down in the US. Trump said he would talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday.

The agreement was confirmed by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: 'Donald Trump and Xi Jinping will talk to complete' the understanding. This was reported by the Bloomberg news agency. Bessent added: the agreement provides for US ownership of the US division of the platform.

Beijing's confirmation

Li Chenggang, China's International Trade Representative and Vice-Minister of Commerce, confirmed that China and the US have reached 'a basic consensus on resolving issues' related to TikTok through cooperation. He said this at the end of the Madrid talks with the US on the trade dossier, which were deemed constructive 'on several' dossiers. Li, in the Chinese state media report, however, added that Beijing, on TikTok, 'firmly opposes the political, instrumental and pressure use of technological, economic and trade cases'.

An affair that started under the Biden administration

During Joe Biden's Democratic presidency, Congress and the White House used national security reasons to approve a US ban on TikTok unless its parent company, ByteDance, sold its controlling stake. But Trump has continued to postpone the possible showdown for the social media app. He has extended the deadline three times during his second term, with the next one scheduled for 17 September.

The Story

TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed over the past decade by ByteDance, a technology company founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and based in the northwestern Haidian district of Beijing.

In 2016, ByteDance launched a short video platform called Douyin in China, which was followed by an international version called TikTok. It then bought Musical.ly, a playback platform popular with teenagers in the US and Europe, and combined it with TikTok, keeping the app separate from Douyin.

Soon after, the app boomed in popularity in the US and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to make serious inroads in the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on creating connections between users, TikTok customised content according to people's interests.

The often funny music videos and clips posted by the creators gave TikTok the image of a sunny corner of the internet where users could find entertainment and a sense of authenticity. Finding an audience on the platform helped launch the careers of music artists such as Lil Nas X.

TikTok gained great popularity during the closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when short dances that went viral became a mainstay of the app. To better compete, Instagram and YouTube eventually launched their own tools for making short videos, known as Reels and Shorts respectively.

With the success of TikTok, US officials expressed concern about the company's origins and ownership, pointing to Chinese laws that require local companies to hand over data requested by the government. Another concern was the proprietary algorithm that populates what users see on the app.