Trump joint venture proposal on TikTok ownership counter-intuitive, expert says
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President Donald Trump’s suggestion of the United States entering into a 50-50 ownership joint venture with TikTok’s parent company to help it avoid a US ban would be “counter-intuitive”, one social media expert has said. Among an array of executive orders signed by the President after he took office on Monday, Mr Trump signed one giving TikTok’s China-based parent firm ByteDance more time to find a buyer for TikTok’s US business to help it avoid a ban because of national security concerns around the company’s links to China.
The President has previously suggested TikTok could avoid the ban by entering into a joint ownership deal with the United States, but no further details on how such a scheme could work have so far been brought forward. Social media expert Drew Benvie, who is also chief executive of social media consultancy Battenhall, said he believed Mr Trump’s proposed approach would not work, and that the stand-off over the app was more about US-China relations on a broader scale.
“TikTok is the jewel in ByteDance’s crown, and the Chinese tech giant will not let go of it lightly,” he told the PA news agency. “In reality, I expect TikTok to be used as a bargaining chip in US-China deals more broadly, and then the app itself will likely end up operating, in the US at least, under tight data regulations. This is the broad direction of travel globally already.”.
He added that the President’s approach would also not solve the concerns raised by the previous Biden administration when it introduced the ban, and was backed by the US Supreme Court earlier this month when it reject ByteDance’s appeal over the new law.
