TikTok Reformed: A New Era of American Ownership
Riley Howell | Contributing Writer
The battle over TikTok’s future has finally come to a close — at least for now that the platform’s U.S. operations have been transferred to a partnership led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Michael Dell.
The move, part of a deal on Jan. 22, marks the end of a six-year legal battle that once threatened to remove the app from American users. Yet, professors at the University of Dayton point out that swapping out owners could simply mean swapping out current problems for similar concerns when it comes to security.
The road to here was far from normal. After the original 2024 TikTok ban, enforcement dragged its feet for over a year because of a string of executive orders.
“President Trump issued an extension upon taking office, but then did so several more times,” said Dr. Christopher Devine, a UD political science expert. “He had no authority to do so, literally, under the law passed by Congress. By issuing several extensions when the TikTok law provided for no more than one, President Trump was effectively making rather than enforcing federal law in this instance.”
Devine pointed out that this “refusal to enforce federal law” has created a messy precedent for the U.S. government. Although the law may have kept 170 million U.S. TikTok users from deleting the app, Devine says the legal timeout essentially ignored what Congress had in mind.
“Politically, this has clearly been a win for him,” Devine observed. The Trump administration managed to “Americanize” the app and retain its massive U.S. audience. However, that win came at a cost, with the boundaries of presidential power becoming even blurrier. “The precedent set by such refusals to enforce federal law is a dangerous one, in my opinion, because it upsets the constitutional structure which empowers Congress, alone, to make law, and the president only to enforce the law – ‘faithfully’, no less.”
Under the new deal, Chinese company ByteDance retains a 19.9% minority stake – just under the 20% legal limit for foreign control. This ownership stake aims to fulfill a federal mandate for “qualified divestiture,” but media ethics experts argue that the real security issues have not been tackled.
“There are ethical issues whenever the government, at any level, influences media ownership decisions,” explained Dr. Chad Painter, a media ethics professor at UD. Painter said our biggest problem is the increasing concentration of media ownership among a handful of powerful families and corporations. “Our media system is premised on the idea of a diversity of voices in the marketplace of ideas, and consolidation, which isn’t a new trend but certainly has been taken to a new level here, is the exact opposite of that concept.”
Painter warns that putting TikTok in the hands of U.S. tech giants doesn’t fix the underlying issue of how these companies treat their users. “Without changes to the infrastructure of the platform, concerns about addictive design and data harvesting also won’t change,” Painter said, “The user is the product, and the more engagement a user has with the platform, the better the product.”
With major political donors now leading TikTok USDS, there is a risk of government interference in content moderation, Painter noted. “There already is some anecdotal evidence that such changes to content moderation have occurred. We’ve seen similar content changes since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.”
But for college students, the immediate gratification from social media often outweighs the risks of data collection and security concerns. Dr. Thomas Skill, an expert in communication technology, believes that while ownership of TikTok has changed, the data practices have not. Platforms collect a wide range of data, from technical details such as IP addresses to behavioral data tracking how long users watch specific clips.
“Platforms use this data to target ads with high precision, often more accurately than you realize,” Skill noted in his research.
Despite these risks, Skill is observing a “caution fatigue” among younger people, with many UD students resorting to saying that “all apps collect data anyway,” and “I can’t control it.” With the U.S. version of TikTok now in full flight, the experts at UD are encouraging students to think critically about political involvement in media ownership. “Absent a new development that draws attention to the potential security risks of TikTok or similar apps, the American people simply seem to have lost interest in this issue,” Devine said.
Ultimately, as TikTok enters a new era of American ownership, the question for UD students and the nation alike isn’t just who owns the platform, but how data and ownership are influencing it every day.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Riley Howell is a student enrolled in Reporting (CMM 338) and the Flyer News Practicum, two courses offered through the Department of Communication that emphasize experiential learning.