According to reporting over last weekend, the Trump administration appears to be closing in on a TikTok deal. Vice President J.D. Vance struck a confident tone with reporters last Friday: “There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns [and] allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.” That’s good news, as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of TikTok poses severe threats to the American people.
However, reports emerged on Sunday confirming what many have suspected for a number of weeks: the administration appears to be open to a compromise agreement that would allow ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to retain control of the app’s algorithm and perhaps some degree of ownership. This outcome may accomplish the second objective Vice President Vance identified — establishing a distinct American entity — but it would likely fail to rectify the deeply concerning national security implications of TikTok’s relationship with the CCP. Control of the algorithm is paramount. Any deal must reckon with this reality.
From what we know publicly, ByteDance seems to be resurrecting an old plan it pitched to Washington in 2022. That plan is called “Project Texas,” which was the company’s efforts to assuage elected officials’ concerns about data security. Under this plan, TikTok would move U.S. user data to Oracle servers in Texas, limit access to that data with U.S. government review, allow Oracle to inspect TikTok’s algorithm and content moderation protocols, and empower Oracle to inspect and review cybersecurity concerns.
After years of discussion, Project Texas was rejected by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency committee authorized to review certain transactions involving foreign investment and the impact of such investment on U.S. national security. However, to stave off Congressional legislation that would have addressed the national security threat, TikTok unilaterally implemented several of these policies. Congress too rejected the Project Texas proposal and instead enacted the TikTok divestiture legislation. As Rep. Moolenaar, Chairman of the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, recently observed, “It’s no shock that even after Project Texas was rolled out, Americans’ data kept flowing to China, and ByteDance still had the power to censor and quietly manipulate users through TikTok’s algorithm.”
ByteDance and TikTok are again working Capitol Hill to sell the Project Texas proposal. It is no accident that Oracle is briefing congressional staffers this week about a potential deal, as it provides cloud services to TikTok with estimated revenues between $480 million and $800 million.
Beijing has already throttled TikTok for its own benefit. This is not a matter of rank speculation, as some pundits in Washington intransigently insist. In 2024, the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers compared TikTok’s China content with similar content on Instagram and YouTube, looking for evidence of censoring anti-CCP content while promoting pro-Beijing messages. The peer-reviewed results were clear: “TikTok is suppressing anti-China content in order to diminish the reach of narratives critical of the CCP.” On content relating to Tibet, Uyghurs, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, TikTok trailed far behind Instagram and YouTube. These findings came in the wake of a December 2023 Wall Street Journal investigation which uncovered evidence of systematic bias against Israel on TikTok in the wake of the Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023.
In the face of growing evidence of CCP control, Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in April 2024. The law goes to the heart of the matter that President Trump rightly identified in 2020: CCP control of TikTok and, more importantly, the algorithm. Instead of risk mitigation measures that ByteDance could easily circumvent, the law requires TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company. The only acceptable national security outcome is one where the ByteDance/TikTok algorithm is not controlled by the CCP and TikTok is no longer in the hands of a foreign adversary.
Any deal that falls short of this standard would leave Americans exposed to the Chinese Communist Party’s predations. In the emerging world of AI and deepfakes, such risks are unacceptable. Imagine the havoc TikTok-generated AI videos could wreak: targeting U.S. soldiers deployed abroad with deepfake videos of their spouses committing infidelity timed to coincide with military action, sowing confusion and weakening morale. TikTok represents the threat of psychological warfare of a heretofore unseen magnitude at the time and place of Beijing’s choosing.
But TikTok wouldn’t have to wait for war to fire this bullet. There are roughly 42 million American teenagers on TikTok. Each of them is vulnerable to the malicious use of deepfakes, as First Lady Melania Trump and bipartisan senators like Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar have warned. Leaving them exposed to the CCP’s predations is unconscionable — but leaving the ByteDance/TikTok algorithm under CCP control would do just that.
TikTok hopes Washington will fall for its head fake. In reality, data privacy isn’t the fundamental issue at play. Whoever controls the app’s algorithm can marry U.S. data with AI deepfakes to psychologically harm Americans and materially threaten our nation’s interests. Americans are counting on the Trump administration to join Congress and the Supreme Court, the latter having unanimously upheld the validity of the TikTok law, in standing up for U.S. national security by ensuring that Beijing’s predatory intentions cannot be accomplished by weaponizing ByteDance/TikTok’s algorithm that has access to 170 million US users.