Social media app TikTok finalized a deal on Jan. 22 with a group of non-Chinese investors to establish its U.S. entity. The agreement allows the app to continue operating in the United States after years of uncertainty surrounding the banning of the popular video-sharing platform.
Both President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden took the position that there were national security threats posed by a Chinese company handling TikTok’s algorithm, said Eric Goldman, professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law.
According to Nancy Kim, the Galvin Chair in Entrepreneurship and Applied Legal Technology at Chicago-Kent College of Law, “The concern was that [TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance] could collect a lot of information, a lot of data about U.S. users, and that information could be used to manipulate TikTok users.”
“This is a foreign-owned asset service that a lot of Americans are using,” said Kim. “It would be very easy to tweak the algorithm so that we might see a particular type of content.”
The newly formed U.S. entity works under the name TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC.
A statement made on the joint venture’s official website on Jan. 22 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.”
The statement also said that the joint venture will retrain, test and update its algorithm on U.S. user data.
The algorithm is stored by tech company Oracle, Kim said.
Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.
“We know that social media has played a massive, massive role in the public debate around elections,” said Catalina Goanta, professor of private law at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “I think the midterm elections are going to be a very, very important moment to look at what’s happening with the TikTok algorithm.”
Other experts share a different sentiment.
“Can you tweak the algorithm?” said Kim. “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s going to work that way. I don’t think that people will continue to use TikTok if that happens.”
Kim has a lot of concerns over data security and privacy of U.S. citizens but doesn’t see how the joint venture is a solution to any of that, she said.