The saga of TikTok's US business sale will end on January 22 after Bytedance agreed to sell a majority stake in the company to several US firms. According to Reuters, Bytedance will only hold 19.9% of the shares while the other 50% will be held by a consortium consisting of Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX. The remaining 30.1% will be held by certain existing ByteDance investors.
According to a leaked memo, TikTok's algorithm in the US will be retrained using local user data to ensure "it is not manipulated by outside parties". The retraining process will be monitored by Oracle. While the security of American user data is cited as a reason for TikTok to be sold, many see its use as a platform to expose the genocide in Palestine as the catalyst for the pro-Israeli Biden administration's order.
President Biden issued an executive order forcing Bytedance to sell TikTok last year because it allegedly posed a security risk to the US public. The service was down for a day and the app was removed from the App Store and Google Play to comply with the order. TikTok was then allowed to resume operations by President Trump, who granted several extensions to the final sale period.
Oracle was initially believed to be among the new owners due to Larry Ellison's close ties to the Trumps and TikTok using Oracle's browser to store data belonging to US citizens.