A framework deal has been reached for the ownership of popular social video platform TikTok, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said after weekend trade talks between the U.S. and China in Spain.
Bessent said in a press conference after the latest round of trade talks between the world’s top two economies concluded in Madrid that U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping would speak on Friday to possibly finalize the deal.
Bessent said that the objective of the framework deal on the social media platform would be to switch to US ownership. Bessent said that Trump and Xi would speak on Friday to complete the deal.
“We are not going to talk about the commercial terms of the deal,” Bessent said. “It’s between two private parties. But the commercial terms have been agreed upon.”
Chinese officials have yet to confirm Bessent’s statement and were not present at the press conference. The meeting in Madrid is the fourth round of trade talks between United States and Chinese officials since Trump launched a tariff war on Chinese goods in April. Now, the two governments are planning for a possible summit between Trump and Xi, though nothing has been confirmed. Analysts say there are possible trade bumps that could delay the visit.
During Joe Biden’s Democratic presidency, Congress and the White House used national security grounds to approve a U.S. ban on TikTok unless its parent company, ByteDance, sold its controlling stake.
Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline for shutting down TikTok, even though the law allows for just one 90-day reprieve, and only if there’s a deal on the table and a formal notification to Congress. The current extension expires on Sept. 17, two days before Trump and Xi are scheduled to discuss the final details of the framework deal. Although Trump hasn’t addressed the forthcoming deadline directly, he has claimed that he can delay the ban indefinitely.
TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed in the past decade by ByteDance, a technology firm founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and headquartered in Beijing’s northwestern Haidian district.
In 2016, ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China and followed up with an international version called TikTok. It then bought Musical.ly, a lip-syncing platform popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined it with TikTok while keeping the app separate from Douyin.
Soon after, the app boomed in popularity in the U.S. and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to make serious inroads in the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on cultivating connections among users, TikTok tailored content to people’s interests.
The often silly videos and music clips content creators posted gave TikTok an image as a sunny corner of the internet where users could find fun and a sense of authenticity. Finding an audience on the platform helped launch the careers of music artists like Lil Nas X.
TikTok gained more traction during the shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, when short dances that went viral became a mainstay of the app. To better compete, Instagram and YouTube eventually came out with their own tools for making short-form videos, respectively known as Reels and Shorts. By that point, TikTok was a bona fide hit.
Challenges came in tandem with TikTok’s success. U.S. officials expressed concerns about the company’s roots and ownership, pointing to laws in China that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. Another concern became the proprietary algorithm that populates what users see on the app.
