The US’ American-ish TikTok awaits

DO YOU remember the World Wide Web? I ask, because increasingly, the world doesn’t seem that wide at all. Also, does anyone remember the US TikTok deal which was signed in December 2025? This seems like an eternity ago, but that deal is expected to close on Thursday (Jan 22).

Even before this wrangling over the social media platform had broken out between the US and China, the days of the Internet’s borderless, free-form proximity had long been numbered.

For years, the online clamour of strangers’ hyperfixations has become increasingly fragmented, splitting along microcultural and geographical boundaries. My TikTok “For You” page is nothing like yours (unless you, too, have an abiding obsession with a highly specific segment of K-pop).

Now, a consortium that includes Oracle, Silver Lake and Emirati investment firm MGX will acquire a 50 per cent stake in a TikTok US joint venture, while the platform’s Chinese parent company ByteDance keeps a 19.9 per cent stake.

As part of the deal, a balkanisation of TikTok is expected to result in the US, with American users’ data stored locally on Oracle’s systems, the TikTok recommendation algorithm retrained on US user data and the US gaining oversight of content moderation.

In an internal memo about the deal in December, TikTok chief executive officer Chew Shou Zi reportedly said that its American users would keep “enjoying the same experience as today”, and that “advertisers will continue to connect with global audiences with no impact”.

Even so, if the algorithm is being retrained, it would be reasonable to expect that the content being recommended to American users will eventually diverge from the content being recommended elsewhere.

The cracks running across the “splinternet” will conceivably widen. For American users, how much more of a mirror will TikTok’s “For You” page become, as opposed to a window out into the world? And who will decide what that mirror reflects? Over time, might different platform rules eventually result in different realities?

At the same time, though, Chinese involvement in other tech deals could portend limitations for the independence of the US TikTok entity. Meta’s acquisition of Singapore-based artificial intelligence (AI) firm Manus, for example, is now under scrutiny by Beijing, which is looking into whether the deal complies with China’s export control laws.

Founded in China, the agentic AI firm moved its headquarters to Singapore last year – a popular manoeuvre designed to make Chinese-origin firms palatable to Western investors. It worked, up until the point when China reminded the industry that national borders can very much assert themselves over the digitalverse.

If the Manus-Meta deal is stymied by regulators, it will demonstrate the limits of beginning life anew as a corporation in another country – no amount of reshoring legal entities and servers can neutralise a firm’s country of origin.

This has interesting implications for the US TikTok joint venture. The deal might have gotten the algorithm out from under the Chinese thumb where the American market is concerned, but just how far out of Chinese reach will that part of TikTok ever be?

The months and years following this deal will test the tensile strength of the thread stretching from Beijing to Silicon Valley. And even as the Internet splinters ever further for users, the geopolitical bonds forged in the real world might prove as ironclad as ever for corporations.