When President Trump enacted the initial ban of Tiktok in 2020, it was on the grounds of the National Security threat, forcing Tiktok owners to comply with ‘National Security’ issues or sell. As a result Tiktok worked with American companies to address ‘National Security’ issues by investing 1.5 billion with Project Texas. The data is stored in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and it is known that they employ US National security agents to ‘inspect’ the data. However, this is still not enough for the US government and the supreme court.
In light of the Palestian Genocide and Tiktok users not ‘conforming’ in western propaganda’s agenda, US Lawmakers went ahead and ban tiktok to specifically tell them divest or banned, ironically which is clumped with the Ukraine and Israel Aid bill. The Supreme Court refused to overrule the sale and because they said it is not about censorship.
If you look at the ownership of tiktok, 20% ownership of Tiktok is by the company’s founders, 20% is by its employees, and overwhelming part of the ownership is by global institutional investors such as Black Rock, General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group. Businessman Kevin O’Leary is willing to buy the Chinese share for a firesale price of $20 billion. This kind of ‘sale’ is equivalent if the Chinese government forcing Apple, Tesla or Microsoft to sell its stake to a Chinese company otherwise it will not be allowed to do business in China. It is not the first time that the US government tries to strongarm a foreign company to sell it to divest like Alstom. In fact, they tried to kidnap Huawei’s CFO, in order to try to force Huawei to bend to its will. The sale of tiktok would have 2 objectives, 1) They would force Bytedance to practically buy the Chinese share at a steal and 2) the US government has more control in its content.
For Tiktok’s case, the Chinese government and Bytedance didn’t take this lying down as they rather shut down its US operations rather selling its share. On January 19, 2025, Tiktok upheld its promise by preemptively shut down. In the turn of events, it decided turn back on after Trump will issue an executive order to postpone Tiktok ban for 90 days. It seems that the US government has blinked first and the forced sale would be very unlikely.
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