Trump Vowed to Wall Off TikTok From China. Did He?

In the months before TikTok finalized a deal to sell its U.S. operations to a group of investors friendly to President Donald Trump, the mood inside the company was chaotic.

Employees had little information about what was going on with the sale, owing in part to what they describe as TikTok’s secretive management style, and mostly learned about developments through the news. A leadership vacuum inside the part of the company that would eventually be sliced off and sold had given way to a proliferation of rumors and theories. When the deal finally closed in January, employees wondered what would change.

On the face of it, not that much.

Employees at the new company, officially named TikTok USDS Joint Venture, still work regularly with the global TikTok organization, according to current and former employees, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, and internal communications reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. That includes coordinating over new features, sharing information about dangerous trends on the app and collaborating over policies. U.S. employees also still use an internal chat system called Lark, which was built by TikTok’s former Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to communicate and share information with both their U.S. and global counterparts.

“There is a necessity to be able to speak to our global colleagues,” said one TikTok employee, “but I can think of a thousand different ways we would be able to do that that wouldn’t necessarily violate at least the spirit of this agreement.”

TikTok, for what it’s worth, sees the close coordination as crucial for the app to continue working and a key element of the framework of the deal.

“Interoperability enables the Joint Venture to provide U.S. users with a global TikTok experience, ensuring U.S. creators can be discovered and businesses can operate on a global scale,” the company said in January.

Like most tech companies, TikTok US has been using artificial intelligence to make its employees more efficient: It recently introduced an AI assistant, Aime, also built by ByteDance, which operates inside Lark. TikTok US leaders have encouraged employees to use the chatbot, though they warned against sharing sensitive U.S. user data with it, an employee said. This is crucial, because shielding Americans’ data from a former parent company that critics argue has ties to the Chinese Communist Party was a key reason that Congress forced a divestiture in 2024. (ByteDance has said it has no such ties.)

TikTok US has said it has indeed walled off Americans’ data in compliance with the law.

But the loose system for making sure that data about American TikTok users doesn’t end up in Lark — essentially one of self-regulation — appears to leave plenty of room for human error. Even if an employee is not deliberately mishandling data, they could easily slip up by accident. In fact, the Department of Justice argued in a 2024 legal filing that TikTok employees had sent “significant amounts of restricted U.S. user data” to each other through Lark.

Other efforts to separate the companies are relatively modest. At TikTok office buildings, U.S. employees can go to TikTok global offices on different floors but are required to get a chaperone, an employee said, and are prohibited from bringing laptops. Prior to the deal, U.S. employees could mostly move freely between the U.S. and global offices.

TikTok has reason to try to make it feel like little has changed and the app is still the same. Roughly 200 million Americans use the social media platform, and any disruption from the sale could trigger a drop in users. “Our core principle remains to stay as aligned with global standards as possible, to preserve the global experience,” an internal post reviewed by POLITICO Magazine said, referring to the process of making policy decisions.

These previously unreported details shed new light on TikTok’s messy corporate split and raise questions about the Trump administration’s success in severing TikTok. They also add new urgency to lawmakers’ concerns about TikTok, particularly as the company faces continued skepticism in Washington and state governments across the country over both national security and child safety issues.

In response to a series of questions, a TikTok US spokesperson pointed to the TikTok USDS Joint Venture website, which includes information about governance, data protection, algorithm security, software assurance and trust and safety measures, as well as its Jan. 23 announcement where the company said it “will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users.” ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment.

The White House continues to praise the deal it helped arrange. “President Trump and Vice President Vance have saved TikTok for its millions of American users,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement. “With the new TikTok under the control of U.S. investors, Americans can continue to enjoy TikTok with their data fully protected.” The administration was reportedly due to get $10 billion for its role in brokering the transaction. Among the U.S. investors were Oracle, co-founded by Trump backer and billionaire Larry Ellison, and the Dell Family Office, whose leader, Michael Dell, gifted more than $6 billion to the president’s “Trump accounts” program last December.

TikTok has faced scrutiny from U.S. regulators for years over its ties to China and its handling of sensitive data about Americans on the app. Critics worry not just about the Chinese government’s potential access to Americans’ data but whether it could spread propaganda to the American public through its algorithm.

In 2022, TikTok announced what would become known as “Project Texas,” a proposed plan aimed at addressing concerns about Chinese influence. As part of this process, TikTok formed a new unit, U.S. Data Security, and pledged to store U.S. user data on servers owned and operated by cloud company Oracle. Current and former employees said in interviews that they view the latest arrangement as merely a reheat of Project Texas.

Some things did change after the deal went through. TikTok US gave employees new email addresses, for instance, and announced changes to their compensation: They would no longer receive restricted stock units from ByteDance and would instead be part of a “profit sharing plan,” which gives out cash bonuses based on the company’s operating profits, internal posts reviewed by POLITICO Magazine show. The U.S. company also assumed final say over enforcing content rules and policies related to U.S. users.

Yet there are still many unknowns about the terms of the deal — particularly around the powerful algorithm that determines what content gets fed to users. TikTok said on its website that the new company will “retrain, test, and update the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data” and “the content recommendation algorithm will be secured in Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment.” It’s unclear if the company licensed the algorithm from ByteDance, or the degree to which the algorithm is still maintained and updated by ByteDance engineers.

And while TikTok representatives and lobbyists regularly meet with lawmakers, it is unclear whether the administration has any ongoing role in ensuring the terms of the deal are upheld. The administration is already facing an ongoing legal challenge that alleges the deal violates the law.

Jim Johnston, a partner at the law firm Davis+Gilbert LLP who followed the TikTok sale closely, said there wasn’t nearly enough transparency around the divestiture, adding that in this situation Congress would normally request documents and hold hearings to “ensure that the deal adhered to the law.”

Some of the lingering questions were expected to be addressed at a Sept. 15 hearing before the House Select Committee on China, which TikTok US chief security officer Will Farrell, was due to attend. The committee’s concerns, according to Chairman John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), included “China’s influence over TikTok’s algorithm and its access to Americans’ data.”

But in late August, TikTok abruptly pulled out of the planned hearing.

TikTok did not publicly comment on the reason, but Moolenaar said TikTok refused to appear out of a desire to avoid scrutiny of its child safety practices, a decision that came soon after Meta reached a $17 billion settlement over claims it hooked young users to its products and misled them about potential harms. Moolenaar vowed to continue working to “ensure TikTok executives publicly address the committee’s questions regarding its operations and safeguards… before the end of the year.” So far, no new hearing has been set.

The plan to create an American TikTok was always fraught. How do you neatly carve out a portion of a business that employs thousands of people across the world, runs on a sea of data moving across systems and countries, and relies on technology — a critical algorithm in particular — built by TikTok’s former Beijing-based parent company?

Even Adam Presser, now the CEO of TikTok US, once argued the plan was not feasible. That’s because “thousands of global engineers, including in China” had worked on TikTok’s code base, Presser said in a 2024 court filing. “It would take at least several years for an entirely new set of engineers to gain sufficient familiarity with the source code,” he said at the time.

The Trump administration was adamant it could be done quickly — though the details were fuzzy. Shortly before Trump was once again sworn in as president, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that required TikTok to divest from ByteDance or face a ban in the U.S. Soon after, a team led by Vice President JD Vance set about trying to assemble a group of investors to buy TikTok’s U.S. operation.

Trump had initially pushed for a ban but changed his tune on TikTok during the 2024 campaign in a bid to appeal to young voters, and perhaps some wealthy donors.

The surreal nature of the White House inserting itself as a broker into a private deal was punctuated by theatrical flourishes from Trump, who made a habit of drip-feeding updates about the negotiations to the press, with varying degrees of reliability.

In a June interview with Fox News, Trump said the buyers were a “group of very wealthy people” whose identities would be announced “in about two weeks.” (The two weeks came and went.) In another interview — months after Fox’s Rupert Murdoch and Oracle’s Larry Ellison curiously appeared to one side of an Oval Office press conference — Trump teased the idea that Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch would be involved in the deal through an investment from Fox Corporation. (No such investment ever materialized.)

Looking to buy time, Trump issued a string of executive orders that effectively ignored the law to shut down TikTok. TikTok employees, meanwhile, tried to push forward like normal; they had grown accustomed to the uncertainty.

“There’s zero transparency, even at the high levels,” said one former employee who left the company last year.

Adding to the precariousness of the situation, several Silicon Valley companies responsible for keeping TikTok online in the United States, including Apple, Google and Oracle, elected to operate in a legal grey zone by staying in line with the administration. Under the law, they should have stopped working with TikTok after the Supreme Court ruling. Instead, relying on assurances from the administration and Trump’s executive orders, they kept hosting TikTok — a high-risk gambit for public companies worth billions of dollars each.

In September, the White House finally issued an executive order green-lighting a deal. For TikTok to achieve a “qualified divestiture,” the order said, it must “execute a transaction that would result in the application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary and that would preclude formerly affiliated entities from maintaining an ‘operational relationship’ with the application’s United States operations.”

That same month, Vance touted the success of the deal in an interview with Fox News Sunday. “I feel very confident that we have successfully separated this company from TikTok global and actually made it so that we can control people’s data security,” he said.

The new American TikTok company was formally established in January 2026. ByteDance would keep the moneymaking parts of TikTok’s business, including advertising and ecommerce, while TikTok US would be focused on data security and content moderation. The final line up of investors included ByteDance, which retained a stake of just under 20% as well as a seat on the board. The logistics of how TikTok US would be severed from TikTok’s global operation — or whether it would maintain any operational ties to its former Beijing-based parent company — were not clear.

“The whole thing was bullshit,” said a former congressional staffer familiar with the process, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

In the months since the corporate split, TikTok officials have been making the case to lawmakers that the new company represents a fresh start: an American operation, endorsed by Trump. In meetings with state and federal officials, they have pushed to drop bans on government workers using TikTok, and tried to soothe concerns over TikTok’s child safety record.

Republican Pennsylvania state Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill, who pushed to ban TikTok on state government devices and for separate legislation to protect minors on social media, said she met with TikTok US in April. The company’s corporate split from ByteDance, she said, had largely addressed national security concerns she had around TikTok, including “the ability of the Chinese Communist government to access data, change algorithms, etcetera.” Now, she added, “the biggest concern is about the child safety and parental empowerment aspect.”

Some of the company’s lobbying efforts do appear to be working. The Trump administration recently rescinded a ban on federal employees using the app. In North Dakota, GOP Gov. Kelly Armstrong dropped a similar ban, stating that TikTok “no longer presents an unmitigated or unique cybersecurity threat to state operations.” A spokesperson for Armstrong said the state’s information and technology office considered “changes in ownership, data security and independent oversight” in making its assessment, though it did not have access to TikTok’s internal systems.

Still, more than 30 other states impose TikTok bans on their government devices.

And another political problem is looming large for TikTok, as alarm grows over how the app negatively affects children and teenagers. TikTok, along with Meta and other social media companies, is facing a wave of lawsuits from young people, school districts and state governments, further complicating its efforts to win over lawmakers. In August, TikTok agreed to settle a lawsuit over children’s privacy with the Department of Justice for $400 million. That same month, Pennsylvania’s attorney general sued TikTok, claiming, among other allegations, that the company “knowingly created platform features intended to cause excessive, compulsive, and addictive use.” Thousands more lawsuits involving TikTok and other social media apps are currently moving through the courts.

TikTok has tried to appear proactive; it recently announced partnerships with two child safety groups. It has also made small steps toward getting back into the fold in Washington. The company is once again a member of NetChoice, a tech lobbying organization that previously revoked TikTok’s membership under pressure from GOP leadership on Capitol Hill. TikTok US also recently became a member of Technet, a Washington-based policy organization that bills itself as “the voice of American innovation.” A recently posted job listing for TikTok’s communications team said the work involved “strengthening [TikTok’s] reputation.”

At least for now, the furor over social media’s effects on young people appears to have eclipsed the national security concerns that once dominated the political conversation around TikTok. Multiple lawmakers who were once vocal critics of TikTok, including China hawks like Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), did not respond to requests for comment.

Adam Kovacevich, the head of the center-left tech policy group, Chamber of Progress, put the shift into two camps. For Republicans, he said, it’s because Trump brokered the deal and “there’s no room in the Republican Party to be on the opposite side of Trump.” Across the aisle, “I suspect the reason is because Democrats viewed taking on TikTok as a political loser with young voters.”

That doesn’t mean that Washington won’t revisit the unanswered questions about the TikTok deal at a later point, particularly if child safety issues haven’t been addressed and concerns with China’s influence still linger.

“I tend to think it’s not over,” Kovacevich said. “It’s just postponed.”