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TikTok Owner Signs Deal To Avoid US Ban (bbc.com) 49

Posted by BeauHD from the years-in-the-making dept.
TikTok's owner ByteDance has signed a deal creating a U.S.-focused joint venture majority-owned by American and global investors, allowing the app to avoid a U.S. ban while ByteDance retains a minority stake. The BBC reports: Half of the joint venture will be owned by a group of investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, according to a memo sent by chief executive Shou Zi Chew. The deal, which is set to close on January 22, would end years of efforts by Washington to force ByteDance to sell its US operations over national security concerns. It is in-line with a deal unveiled in September, when US President Donald Trump delayed the enforcement of a law that would ban the app unless it was sold.

TikTok said in the memo that the deal would enable "over 170 million Americans to continue discovering a world of endless possibilities as part of a vital global community." Under the agreement, ByteDance will retain 19.9% of the business, while Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX will hold 15% each. Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, according to the memo.
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TikTok Owner Signs Deal To Avoid US Ban More

TikTok Owner Signs Deal To Avoid US Ban

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  • Here comes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:04PM (#65870057)
    the censorship...

    • Yup, now it is with US ownership...

    • Re: Here comes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gerf ( 532474 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:38PM (#65870137) Journal
      It is already censored. Try to post about June 6 Tiananmen Square and claim Taiwan is an independent country and that the Spratley Islands belong to the Philippines. The law is about keeping the CCP from censoring US media, and spying and tracking US citizens including journalists, politician, and military.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rujiel ( 1632063 )
        That take was forgotten at the back of the fridge for nearly a year, taken out and then re-microwaved.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Censorship on Tiktok has already started recently with the removal of aNTiSeMitIc ComMeNts about the current genocide.
  • Thanks Larry Ellison, and great job to the dem legislators who just couldn't suffer critics of Israel, delivering us something drastically worse for everyone but their donors.

  • 50.0 exactly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:12PM (#65870071) Homepage

    ByteDance will retain 19.9% of the business, ... another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors

    So, exactly 50% will be held by ByteDance or existing ByteDance investors. That number can't be a coincidence.

    If even one person of the rest of the investors sides with ByteDance and its Investors, ByteDance still has full control.

    • Re:50.0 exactly (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Excelcia ( 906188 ) <slashdot@excelcia.ca> on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:26PM (#65870105) Homepage Journal

      If even one person of the rest of the investors sides with ByteDance and its Investors, ByteDance still has full control

      And this is a bad thing exactly how? How to steal a company: Make vague insinuations, up the volume and call it evil citing more vague issues, threaten to ban it, and then say, well, if you turn over control maybe we'll let it slide. No different than protection money for the mob.

      Gotta love how the biggest loudmouths for a competition and innovation-based economy use clubs to bludgeon the foreign competition to death with.

    • Dunno why we don't just give China the same ongoing treatment they already give us. Fair is fair, after all.

      • Like what, exactly?

        • For one thing we can shit directly on China-paid trolls like yourself

        • Well, for example, if they do business here, they have to partner with a local company who owns a 51% share.

          • Simple. (Besides you are wrong, you have to partner with a partner, not with a company).
            The 51% partner gets "class B shares", just the same as in China.

            Bottom line: no voting rights.

            Ooops.

            • (Besides you are wrong, you have to partner with a partner, not with a company).

              Tomato, tomato. It's still a business entity. This isn't like comparing a deque to a linked list.

              The 51% partner gets "class B shares", just the same as in China.

              Bottom line: no voting rights.

              That's still a controlling equity stake. Just like with your linked lists, the devil is in the details, namely in the form of "Corporate Structure Requirements". Among other things, it gives the "partner" a lot of leverage to set terms, including things like technology transfers.

              Ooops.

              Indeed quite an oops on your part. But I doubt you'll understand why. I don't believe any explanation I give you will be adequate, like

              • Shares with no voting rights, do not control anything.

                If you and I make a company, you have 90% of the share and I have 10% and your shares have no voting rights: you have nothing to control. Simple. The only thing you can do is is "ask questions" to put a burden on the administration of the company.

                I suggest do read the relevant laws about stock companies.

                No idea about your lists, queues and deques. Lists of what? Shares?

                What is next? When I own 5% of Apples shares, I can go to a random bank and can demand

                • Shares with no voting rights, do not control anything.

                  Contractually, they very much do.

                  If you and I make a company, you have 90% of the share and I have 10% and your shares have no voting rights: you have nothing to control.

                  False. This isn't like your beloved Nazi land where only the guy with all the assumed power gets his way on everything. There are a lot of reasons why this doesn't work the way you think it does, (among other things, the board of directors don't get to make all the decisions for the company, rather its legal representative does) but the biggest concern here is IP transfers. The joint venture has to be given rights to the IP in China in order to actually use them. And, even i

                  • Read a book about law.

                    It seems you do not know the concepts of shares that have voting rights and shares that have none ... /facepalm

    • Control over a 1$ USA ltd. company.

      Who the the funk cares who owns a ltd. which probably does not even have a single employee.

      And then again: I suggest to read up about what shareholders actually have control. It is not what you think it is.

  • It's ironic that Google (a US company) is heavily censored (see Youtube) and US citizens have resorted to a Chinese platform to speak freely.

    I'm old enough to remember the "Black Friday" protests during the Clinton/Gingrich timeframe when the left was heavily opposed to censoring the web. It was the political right that were the would-be censors. Something has happened over the past 10 years where this paradigm has reverted 180 degrees and the censorship is coming from the complete opposite direction n
    • Many people--including fans of Jimmy Kimmel, or drag performance, or news reports critical of the president or the late St. Charlie, or non-violent protesters--would consider government seizure of the means of speech to be the greatest threat to free speech. But it's true that you can now insult out-groups and tout ivermectin on Twitter now, so I guess the First Amendment is doing better than ever!

    • Who was ever asking for censorship of the web back then? The closest thing to censorship demands I can recall during that period were e.g. Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno, Joe Lieberman, Herb Kohl, and a number of other "who's who" of the Democratic party demanding a crackdown on video games, mostly because of Night Trap. Apparently it wasn't wholesome enough for their values. It featured a scene of a "scantily clad" female having something done to her that any sane person would just laugh at, but the word on t

    • Re:If you want to speak freely on the internet... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by taustin ( 171655 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @08:19PM (#65870213) Homepage Journal

      It's ironic that Google (a US company) is heavily censored (see Youtube) and US citizens have resorted to a Chinese platform to speak freely.

      Try posting a video there about Tiananmen Square. One that accurately reports how the government ended it.

      Let us know how that works out for you. If they let you have internet access in the prison library.

    • What censorship do you see exactly on youtube? Ever since Trump-1, the social media companies have been intentionally handsoff with the algorithm AFAICS.

      The more ephemeral nature of Tiktok might give more visibility to extreme viewpoints I guess, but that's more due to the format.

  • That's exactly what everyone needs - Oracle's avarice buoyed by the UAE's psychotic oppression game, refined by China's carefully engineered oppression.

    That's the GOP's vision for the country - From each according to their ability, to each according to my whim, and shut your fucking yap if you don't want to be dismembered, serf.

  • Is this the free market at work or no?

    • Re: Is this still capitalism? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dwater ( 72834 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @07:32PM (#65870121)

      I'll go with "no".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      King Donnie transfers ownership to Uncle Larry.

      Welcome to the oligarchy!

    • You seem confused. What does the "free market" have to do with Capitalism?

    • Free trade should be done only between like minded nations. Trade with adversaries should be goal based and allowing foreign investment by adversaries is fucking idiotic ... TikTok US (and EU) should never have existed.

      • They don't exist anyway.

        My ticktock app works the same here in Europe as it did in Thailand last years.

        The only difference is: I surprisingly get German adevertizing while I never got any advertizing before.

        No idea why people who never used ticktock hate it. It is a video platform. People post videos about themself.
        What the fuck is wrong with that? Randomly sprinkling adverts are completely obviously adverts, you scroll over them. Just like on any other "web site".

        My ticktock stuff are videos about me trave

  • So with this deal we go from China Propaganda/dumbing us down, to Trump lackeys, Propaganda/dumbing us down?

  • 50% + 15% + 15% + 15% = 95%. Who gets the remaining 5%?

  • Palestine was the problem with TikTok (Score:4, Interesting)

    by oumuamua ( 6173784 ) on Friday December 19, 2025 @09:25PM (#65870337)
    Awesome article on the Palestine motivation for the TikTok ban/transfer on TheVerge

    Regardless, governments certainly believe that images speak to the conscience in a way that can shake the foundations of power itself. It is why Richard Nixon was caught on the Oval Office tapes furiously coping about The Terror of War, musing about how surely it must be fake. It is why the United States instituted a blanket ban on photographs of flag-draped coffins of soldiers returning from the battlefield from 1991 to 2009. It is why IDF spokesperson Effie Defrin has told reporters that “most of” the images of starving children were “fake, fake distributed by Hamas.” It is why China still censors a photograph of a man with two plastic bags standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square; it is why China banned TikTok in Hong Kong during the 2020 democracy protests. And it’s why the United States did what it did in March 2024. Six months after the October 7th massacre of 1,195 people by Hamas, and the commencement of Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza, upwards of 30,000 Palestinians, including 13,000 children, had been killed. America’s response to all of this was, of all things, an attempt to ban TikTok.

    https://www.theverge.com/featu... [theverge.com]

    • If I watch some Gaza stuff on Youtube, the frontpage offers more. I doubt it's any different for X.

      The ban on TikTok was because US government realised they could track gays working at the Pentagon through Grindr, it was an extension of the forced divestment there because. Social media apps with GPS access are treasure troves of intelligence data. The first TikTok law predated the Gaza conflict.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rujiel ( 1632063 )
        Dis you read the article? Yes, the first tiktok ban predated it by three years, and then was dead in the water only to be picked up by democrats in 2024 and hastily brought acroas the finish line in response to young people's awareness of the genocide. The fact that tiktok is still operating, albeit it as a much more censored platform than before, makes the national security explanation that you provided seem even more ridiculous. Look at who they sold it to: mega zionist goblin Larry Ellison, who is also p

  • So (Score:2)

    by Wolfier ( 94144 )

    If 19.9% is retained by ByteDance and 30.1% is retained by "affiliates of existing investors", what's in the deal that resolves the national security concerns? In my opinion this deal is not working.

    • It will have American leadership with fiduciary duty to stockholders, not Bejing.

      If Bytedance headquarters got a CCP memo about someone to hire at the US datacenter, it would just happen. There was a straight official line of control from Xi to managers at TikTok US, that line is going to disappear. Routine streams of data to China to provide cover and plausible deniability for data exfiltration will disappear too.

      Now if Xi wants TikTok US data, he will need to use proper spycraft.

    • The other 30.1% is made up of largely other foreign investment firms/private equity firms like KKR, Sequoia and Susquehanna.

  • Yep, now we have another platform controlled by Trump's oligarchy to spew forth propaganda.

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