President Trump is scheduled to speak by phone today, Friday, to Chinese president Xi Jinping. The main topic is expected to be free trade and tariffs, but the future and fate of China-owned TikTok is also on the topic list.
The future of TikTok, namely ending its Chinese ownership, is a hot-button decision President Trump keeps postponing after taking office in January.
Concerned that TikTok owner ByteDance is a state-controlled partner with the Chinese Communist Party, Congress passed a sale-or-ban bill with bipartisan approval in late 2024. That legislation, which demanded a U.S.-owned buyer, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court after TikTok appealed.
At the same time he was returning to the White House, President Trump signed an executive order to delay enforcement. That deadline came and went in April but was then extended again in June.
Gordon Chang, senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, is well known for keeping an eye on China and its communist party. He tells AFN the most important issue for him is TikTok's algorithm that determines what people see, or don't see, on their iPad and iPhone.
“It could be we get the Chinese technology, and we sort of determine the algorithm,” he says, “but I'm not sure that that's going to be the case.”
The social media algorithm is the reason why YouTube, for example, recommends Major League Baseball clips to you or funny animal videos. That's because it recognizes what seems to interest you, like walk-off homers, and then recommends related content.
In the case of China-owned TikTok, it is known in that nation as Douyin. That state-approved algorithm targets Chinese children with topics such a Chinese culture and patriotism, healthy eating, and educational videos. It also bans political dissent and limits screen time.
In 2022, a Canadian-based group created TikTok accounts posing as fictional U.S. teens. When its researchers “liked” videos about self-harm and eating disorders, they were flooded with videos related to that. Choosing a user name related to their struggle, they said, created even more content, the Associated Press reported at the time.
The family of New York teen Chase Nasca, who committed suicide in 2022, sued ByteDance in February claiming TikTok flooded their son with dark, violent content that led him to take his life.
“We have seen from Wall Street Journal reporting,” Chang shares, “that the new TikTok entity will license the Chinese algorithm, but it will be managed by U.S. engineers.”
Allowing he doesn’t know what that plan will look like in technical terms, Chang says what he does know is China currently uses the algorithm in a vastly different way than U.S. users.
At a press conference this week, during President Trump’s state visit to Great Britain, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy about the president about the TikTok sale and the controversial algorithm.
“Are the Americans going to come up with their own algorithm,” Doocy asked, “or are they going to continue to use the successful, but addictive, Chinese algorithm?”
President Trump repeated previous comments that he personally likes TikTok and credits it with helping his presidential campaign. He also said it’s a valuable product, and predicted it will make its eventual buyers wealthy, but he never addressed Doocy’s question about the algorithm.
