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At Long Last, Our TikTok ‘National Security’ Nightmare Is ‘Over’
TikTok, in a press release late Thursday:
Today, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025, now enabling more than 200 million Americans and 7.5 million businesses to continue to discover, create, and thrive as part of TikTok’s vibrant global community and experience. The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users.
TikTok’s legally mandated, questionably necessary, and long delayed divestiture from China’s ByteDance is complete. Finally?
Trump, naturally, is taking credit[1] for “saving TikTok” (despite first trying to ban it during his first term).
With apologies for the direct link to “Truth” Social; trumpstruth.org hasn’t been updated since January 19, 2026, as of this writing. ↩︎
(Note, too, the press release references the executive order Trump signed in September, but doesn’t mention the law passed by Congress and signed by Joe Biden. The release could have said “in compliance with U.S. legislation signed by President Biden…” but that would have vexed the Toddler-in-Chief.)
This change in ownership shifts control of TikTok’s all-important algorithm from the authoritarian government of China to the authoritarian government of America. From The New York Times coverage (gift link):
Several of the new investors have ties to Mr. Trump, raising concerns for some TikTok users that the app could start showing more content aligned with the president’s views or the positions of the U.S. government.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, has a close relationship with Mr. Trump and lobbied the president directly on behalf of the current bid by his son, David Ellison, to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. MGX has done business with the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial.
Anupam Chander, a law and technology professor at Georgetown University, said the TikTok deal allowed for “more theoretical room for one side’s views to get a greater airing.”
“My worry all along is that we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda,” he added.
Professor Chander is being diplomatic. This is a $14 billion entity with access to 200 million Americans, managed and controlled by several investors with close ties to the Trump regime, which will “retrain” the “content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data.”
After Elon Musk turned X/Twitter into a Nazi bar, it’d be more shocking if a Trump-influenced TikTok doesn’t swerve hard into MAGA propaganda.