The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Saturday offered a fuller picture of a TikTok deal between the United States and China that would allow the app to continue operating on American phones. She said the software giant Oracle would handle data and privacy for the new American TikTok, and described a new board for the company with a majority of American directors.
Speaking on the Fox News program “Saturday in America,” Ms. Leavitt said that “we are 100 percent confident that a deal is done,” but added in the same breath that the deal had not yet been signed. She said that could happen in the coming days.
Both the Trump administration and China have offered vague statements this past week about the status of a deal to save TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Congress last year passed a rare bipartisan law to ban the app unless it found a new, non-Chinese owner, because of fears that Beijing could use its ties to TikTok to get Americans’ sensitive user data or to spread propaganda in the country.
President Trump told reporters on Friday that Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, had approved a deal. A spokesman for China’s ministry of commerce said Saturday that the two sides had reached a basic framework agreement.
Ms. Leavitt’s remarks on Saturday suggested a deal similar to one ByteDance has been working toward for months, which would spin out a new American TikTok entity. Under that plan, some of TikTok’s largest investors would maintain their stake in the American app, while ByteDance would also bring in new U.S. investors to reduce Chinese ownership to less than 20 percent in order to satisfy the law.
She said a new board controlling TikTok in the United States would have seven seats, with six held by Americans. She also confirmed that Oracle, which already provides computing resources for TikTok, would lead “data and privacy” for the new entity.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post White House Outlines a TikTok Deal With a U.S. Board appeared first on New York Times.
