TikTok is here to stay…sort of. After months of extending the deadline by which ByteDance would be required to sell off U.S. operations of TikTok or be banned, President Donald Trump seems to have finally struck a deal for it to be purchased by American investors. But the deal may leave American TikTok users cut off from the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Trump once again extended the sale-or-ban deadline<\/a>, this time until December 16. But he also announced<\/a> this week that “a deal with China” was now in place.\u00a0“President Trump and Party Chair Xi will speak on Friday to complete the deal,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said<\/a> on Monday.<\/p>\n Details of this framework are still sketchy. But from what’s been reported, it seems that a group of U.S. investors\u2014including Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz\u2014will essentially be launching a spinoff TikTok app for the United States.<\/p>\n “The arrangement, discussed by U.S. and Chinese negotiators in Madrid this week, would create a new U.S. entity to operate the app, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest,” The<\/em> Wall Street Journal<\/em> reports<\/a>. “This new company would also have an American-dominated board with one member designated by the U.S. government.”<\/p>\n (Combating the prospect of Chinese propaganda by giving the the U.S. government partial control of the app? That’s logic only a propagandist could love…)<\/p>\n “Existing users in the U.S. would be asked to shift to a new app, which TikTok has built and is testing,” the Journal<\/em> reports.<\/p>\n If this happens, it’s unclear how the U.S. TikTok app would interact with the global TikTok app.<\/p>\n Some are worried<\/a> that<\/a> U.S. app users would be cut off from the rest of TikTok’s global community, unable to view videos from users in other countries or to share their own videos internationally.<\/p>\n According to the Financial Times<\/em><\/a>, this isn’t what TikTok’s sellers want. A “person familiar with the matter said TikTok had been developing a standalone US app in anticipation of a deal but was keen to ensure that content generated by American users would still be available to users in the ‘rest of the world’ app and vice versa,” it says.<\/p>\n According to Wang Jingtao<\/a> of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the U.S. buyers will be “licensing the algorithm and other intellectual property rights” from TikTok parent company ByteDance for their new app.<\/p>\n But a deal in which users of a U.S. TikTok app are still fully plugged into the main app, and still reliant on ByteDance’s algorithms, might not satisfy the requirements of the ban-or-divest measure<\/a> signed into law by former President Joe Biden in April 2024. “Analysts have said the algorithm must be fully operated by the US entity to meet the requirements of the divest-or-ban law,” notes the Times. “<\/em>But the law allows the US president to determine if ByteDance has fully divested from TikTok, giving Trump the power to approve the deal.”<\/p>\n That means it ultimately might not matter whether the terms of this deal meet the requirements set out in the law; if Trump decides he likes the terms, then that’s enough. And Trump has already shown his willingness to ignore the law’s actual dictates<\/a> by repeatedly extending the sale deadline, despite it possibly being unconstitutional<\/a> for him to do so.<\/p>\n It would be funny if the ultimate deal ends up letting ByteDance keep control of the algorithm. One of the main stated rationales<\/a> for the sell-or-ban law was that China could influence and control U.S. users of TikTok through its control of ByteDance (by way of ByteDance having developed TikTok in China).\u00a0That fits an interpretation of this whole debacle in which the real impetus for the law was more about signaling anti-China sentiment and\/or making a show of “protecting children” rather than any real “national security concerns.”<\/a><\/p>\n In any event, the precise contours of the algorithm deal are yet unclear. The Journal<\/em> says “TikTok engineers will re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance.…Both sides are still working out the final details of the proposed deal and terms could change.”<\/p>\n \n New York lawmakers have once again introduced legislation that would decriminalize prostitution. The measures\u2014Assembly Bill 3251<\/a>, sponsored by Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest (D\u2013Brooklyn), and Senate Bill 2513<\/a>, sponsored by state Sen. Julia Salazar (D\u2013Brooklyn)\u2014would remove the crime of selling or offering to sell sex acts in exchange for money and only keep the crime of “patronizing a person for prostitution” when the person being patronized is less than 18 years old. They would also remove criminal penalties for “promoting prostitution” unless the prostitution involved a minor or an adult being forced or coerced.<\/p>\n Politico<\/em> talked to Forrest and Salazar<\/a> at a Tuesday screening of Sex Work: It’s Just a Job<\/em>, a documentary about efforts to decriminalize sex work in New York. “The biggest challenge that we face is humanizing sex workers, getting legislators to understand that, actually, whether they want to believe it or not, or recognize it or not, there are sex workers all around us,” Salazar said. “I know that we still have our work cut out for us, but I hope to see it move through the Codes Committee and hopefully the legislative process this year.”<\/p>\n A plurality of people in New York City support legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution, per a new survey<\/a>. Conducted by Public Policy Polling on behalf of the group Decriminalize Sex Work, the poll<\/a> involved 556 registered New York City voters. Forty-four percent of the poll’s respondents said prostitution between consenting adults should be legal, while 33 percent said it should be a crime and 24 percent said they weren’t sure.<\/p>\n Related:<\/strong> Watch Kaytlin Bailey and Melanie Thompson debate at a recent Soho Forum about whether paying for sex should be a crime:<\/p>\n
\nLawmakers Reintroduce Bills To Decriminalize Sex Work, as Polls Show New York City Residents in Favor<\/h2>\n