The US treasury secretary has said Washington has reached a “framework” deal with China on the ownership of TikTok’s American operations.
Scott Bessent said the framework was set in trade talks in Madrid to pave the way for US ownership. He added that US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping would “complete” the deal on Friday. China has not commented.
Trump said on Truth Social that talks in Madrid had “gone very well”, with a deal reached “on a certain company that young people in our country very much wanted to save”.
A deadline is looming for the Chinese owner of TikTok to find a buyer for its American operations or face a ban in the US.
Brief History
TikTok was fending off claims that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, would share user data from its popular video-sharing app with the Chinese government, or push propaganda and misinformation on its behalf.
China’s foreign ministry accused the US of spreading disinformation about TikTok’s potential security risks following a report in the Wall Street Journal that the committee on foreign investment in the US – part of the treasury department – was threatening a US ban on the app unless its Chinese owners divest their stake.
TikTok said it would route all data from US users to servers controlled by Oracle, the Silicon Valley company it chose as its US tech partner in 2020 in an effort to avoid a nationwide ban. But it is storing backups of the data in its own servers in the US and Singapore. The company said it expects to delete US user data from its own servers, but it has not provided a timeline as to when that would occur.
Credit: bbc.com
