TikTok's sale: There is no 'one ring to rule them all'

America may soon own TikTok but not what really matters: the algorithm that decides what we watch, think and share.

- Simon Chesterman and Chen Tsuhan

When the United States ordered TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest its American operations or face a ban, it was framed as a national security issue. The concern was that the Chinese authorities could use the platform's data or its mysterious "algorithm" to shape what hundreds of millions of users see and think.

But what exactly is being sold? Is it the company's user base, its data or the algorithm that powers its success? The answer, for now, is murky.

New investors might gain ownership of the platform and access to its data infrastructure, but control of the algorithm itself - the lines of code that decide what videos go viral - is another matter entirely.

An Al algorithm is not a fixed recipe but a learning system. Its outputs shift as it absorbs new data and user behaviour. Even if TikTok's American operations were separated, the "new" TikTok would quickly become a different creature, trained on different data and shaped by different users.

That makes the political rhetoric about "seizing control of the algorithm" misleading. You can own the company; you can even access the source code. But you cannot easily control a system that learns from human behaviour, or from the attention economy that rewards outrage, amusement and emotion over accuracy or reason.

WHEN NEUTRAL ISN'T NEUTRAL