By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -An agreement between Washington and Beijing on the future of TikTok will include Americans holding six of seven board seats for the short video app’s U.S. operations and China’s ByteDance naming the seventh board member, a senior White House official said on Saturday.
The official said the agreement will also require that all data on American users will be stored on U.S. cloud computing infrastructure run by U.S. software firm Oracle.
U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to close a final deal to keep the popular platform from closing. Congress had ordered the app shut down for U.S. users by January 2025 if its U.S. assets were not sold by Chinese owner ByteDance.
On Friday, Trump said he and Chinese President Xi Jinping made progress on a TikTok agreement in a phone call and would meet face-to-face in six weeks. It has not been clear in Beijing’s statements how advanced the progress has been.
Trump administration officials have been adamant that major parts of the agreement are already done, including that the U.S. will have some control over the app’s algorithm. U.S. officials had warned the algorithm could be used by China to manipulate what Americans see on social media.
The senior White House official said the agreement meant the TikTok algorithm “will be secured, retrained, and operated in the United States outside of ByteDance’s control.”
The official said U.S. users would still be able to use TikTok to interact with content from around the world.
ByteDance would hold less than 20% of the stock of a joint venture controlling TikTok’s U.S. operations, the official said.
(Writing by Jason Lange; Editing by Mary Milliken, Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)
