A agreement Between the United States and China about Tiktok’s property, includes new stipulations on which controls the algorithm of the social media society, a closely kept secret which turned out to be a major collision point in negotiations between countries.
The Chinese government has sworn once to block the sale of Tiktok algorithm, the technology that seems intuir the preferences of user almost instantly and which has been an engine of the explosive growth of the video sharing application in recent years.
Previously, Tiktok also seemed little willing to move. In May, when the platform disputed a law of 2024 Prohibit Tiktok In the United States, the company declared in a legal file that “deactivating the American activities of Tiktok Inc. and completely separating it from the global integrated platform which it is part is not commercially, technically or legally possible”.
President Trump this week Once again pushed the application of the Tiktok lawWho would oblige his parent company, Bytedance, based in Beijing, to sell his participation in the application or to be cut off from the American market.
In the meantime, a senior White House official said on Monday that the United States and China had entered into the basic details of the application ownership. The new structure will be Move Tiktok American operations In a “joint venture” based in the United States which will control the algorithm and supervise security, said the manager.
Bytedance and Tiktok did not respond to requests for comments.
Who will control the Tiktok algorithm?
According to the White House manager, the new arrangement will operate and control a copy of the algorithm. The Oracle software manufacturer “will offer a sort of security from top to bottom” throughout the company, said the manager, noting that this will involve monitoring technology as well as managing the way American data is stored.
“It will be permanently monitored because it works to ensure that it behaves appropriately, that it is not used for malicious purposes and that it is not influenced,” said the White House manager.
The president and chief of Oracle technology is Larry Ellison, whose son, David Ellison, is the president and chief executive officer of Paramount Skydance, who is the parent company of CBS. The Ellison family has a controlling interest in Paramount Skydance.
Trump, asked last week what would happen with Tiktok algorithm, said: “Tiktok has enormous value. The United States has this value in his hand since we are those who have to approve it.”
The Chinese law prohibits the export of the algorithm owner of Tiktok, including in the United States, without the approval of the government, according to experts. Last week, Wang Jingtao, deputy director of the Chinese Cyberspace Affairs Commission last week told journalists in Madrid that the arrangement included an agreement on “the use of intellectual property rights”, according to the Associated Press.
Asked about this structure last week, Sarah Kreps, a non -resident researcher at Brookings Institute, a non -partisan political research organization, told CBS Moneywatch that, as she understands, Bytedance would give an American entity the legal authorization to use the algorithm in certain terms.
“It would therefore be as if they rented the algorithm rather than selling it,” she said.
What makes Tiktok’s special algorithm special?
Algorithms are complex data systems that act as recommendation engines, classifying the content that users finally see in their flows. They also help companies collect information on their customers in order to serve them targeted advertisements, a key revenue source.
Like other social media players, Tiktok algorithm provides content to users according to their interests and interactions on the platform. Lauryn Williams, assistant director and senior colleague focused on the Center for Strategic and International Studies, described the algorithm as the “secret sauce” of Tiktok.
Kreps highlights the algorithm’s ability to quickly resume the user’s behavior, interests and preferences. “There is something that is so well suited to what they understand that people want it to put them on the platform and keep them there in a way that does not seem to be the case with other platforms,” she said.
In his own explanation of how he recommends videos, Tiktok says that it considers a range of factors, such as the duration of the duration of a video and information on personal users, such as the linguistic preference or the country of origin of someone. The algorithm “then selects from a large collection of eligible content and classify them according to the prediction by the system of the probability that you are interested in each.”
A decision of the Supreme Court of January Maintain the Tiktok Ban Note that each interaction that a user has on Tiktok – whether watching a video, following an account or leaving a comment – allows the recommendation system to “adapt a personalized content flow more”.
National security concerns
In Madrid, US trade representative Jamieson Greer said last week that “we want to make sure that the Chinese have a fair and invested environment in the United States, but still that US national security is coming first,” CNN.
But while an agreement between the United States and China could tackle the property dispute, it may not solve all the national security problems that led Congress to Pass the prohibition of Tiktok With bipartite support in April 2024, the experts told CBS Moneywatch before the details of the new structure have been announced.
To minimize national security problems, William Akoto, assistant professor at the American university, said that the new arrangement had to ensure that engineers in China are unable to access the American version of Tiktok. If the algorithm returns user data to China or if the algorithm can be updated outside the United States, this could leave data from vulnerable American users, he said.
The Ministry of Justice Last year, accused Tiktok Collecting sensitive data on American users, warning that the Chinese government could use the information to manipulate the content that people see. He also said that Tiktok employees were able to communicate directly with the Bytedance engineers in China via an internal messaging system called Lark.
In 2022 Tiktok recognized in a letter to the American senators that employees based in China could have access to data from American users in certain circumstances and said it was taking measures to strengthen data security.
In its decision to maintain Tiktok’s ban in January, the Supreme Court also noted that China can demand that Tiktok’s parent company “cooperates with (its) efforts to obtain personal data” and “there is not much to prevent all this information from being in the hands of an designated foreign opponent”.
