Skip to main content

TikTok reaches deal to sell its U.S. operations to Oracle

TikTok has reportedly struck a deal with Oracle to sell its U.S. operations to the American software giant, just ahead of the September 15 deadline to sell the business imposed by President Trump.

The deal ensures that the popular social media app will remain operational for its millions of fans in the U.S.

News of the acquisition came not long after the original frontrunner, Microsoft, announced it had failed in its bid to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations following prolonged talks with the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance.

Digital Trends has reached out to Oracle for details on the deal with TikTok and we will update this piece when we hear back.

The scramble for TikTok to find a buyer came after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in early August that said the app would be banned in the U.S. unless ByteDance sold its U.S. assets to an American company by September 15, 2020.

A later executive order extended the deadline to November 12, but last week Trump told reporters that the deadline would not in fact be extended and that ByteDance had until September 15 to reach a deal.

As part of Beijing-based ByteDance, Trump considered TikTok a threat to national security.

In the original executive order, Trump said TikTok “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories.”

It added that if the Chinese government accessed TikTok’s data, it could potentially allow it to “track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

The order also claimed that TikTok “reportedly censors content” that the Chinese government considers to be politically sensitive, and said the app “may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party.”

TikTok said at the time that it was “shocked” at the order, adding that it has “never shared user data with the Chinese government, nor censored content at its request.”

The app is believed to have around 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., and around 800 million users globally.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This beloved TikTok hashtag just got its own app feature
The TikTok app on a smartphone's screen. The smartphone is sitting on a white table.

A popular hashtag-turned-online-community has its own TikTok feature now.

On Tuesday, TikTok launched a new feature that is dedicated to #BookTok, a hashtag and TikTok community that is centered around discussing books. The new feature allows TikTok users to add links to books in their videos. According to TikTok's blog post announcement about the feature, when users select the links that are posted in the TikTok videos they're watching, the links will open up "a dedicated page with details about the book, including a brief summary. and a collection of other videos that linked the same title." The feature also allows users to save book titles to their profiles' Favorites tab.

Read more
Instagram is undoing its TikTok-like changes you hated so much
New features for Instagram Reels

Popular social media service Instagram is reconsidering its pivot to a TikTok-style video feed after recent changes proved to be highly unpopular with its fan base.

Over the past several weeks, Instagram has been testing a version of the app that opened into a feed of full-screen photos and videos, seemingly attempting to morph the service into something that more closely resembles TikTok. Similarly, the new feed also disproportionately pushes seemingly random "recommended" posts, squeezing out content from those folks that Instagram users have actually chosen to follow.

Read more
TikTok adds Twitter- and Instagram-like content control tools
Screenshots of TikToks new age restriction features.

It's been said that other platforms have been mimicking TikTok's coolest features, but now it looks like the popular short-form video app is learning from its social media predecessors as well. TikTok is rolling out a few new content control features and they remind us of the sort of content controls you'd see on other platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

On Wednesday, TikTok announced the rollout of three new content curation and control features: content filters, age restrictions on content, and limiting content recommendations for certain topics.

Read more