Weeks after U.S. President Donald J. Trump ordered Chinese based TikTok to sell off its American assets to an American company, a deal is finally in the works. As rumored, Bill Gates and Microsoft wanted to control the social media platform used by millions, especially American teenagers and young adults, but ByteDance, the Chinese based owner of the platform rejected the company’s bid.
Instead, ByteDance chose Oracle as “America’s Trusted Partner”. Oracle won’t be outright buying the app but will become the face of the company in the United States.
“ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s U.S. operations to Microsoft,” Microsoft said in a statement this week. “We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests. To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety, and combatting disinformation, and we made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas.”
The app reportedly has 100,000,000 users in the United States. For more on this story, check out the Wall Street Journal.
Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash
