China will determine TikTok's fate in America

THE WHITE HOUSE'S TikTok deal has devolved into quite a spectacle.

- Catherine Thorbecke

Ahead of the deadline on Saturday for the app to divest from its Chinese parent company or face a US ban, we still don't have an answer on how it might do this. A flurry of last-minute interest has emerged, with players from Amazon.com to Andreessen Horowitz and Blackstone reportedly tossing their hats in the increasingly crowded ring of potential buyers.

Some of the latest reports suggest that investors could arrange a deal that keeps ownership of the app's powerful recommendation algorithm in the hands of Beijing-based ByteDance. If that's the case, it's not clear how that would assuage one of the central concerns that spurred the ban law in the first place: That the recommendation engine could be exploited to influence the content served to TikTok's 170 million American users. This arrangement may appeal to Beijing, which tweaked its export rules to include algorithms when talks of a ban first emerged. But it won't quell the fears of China hawks in President Donald Trump's own cabinet.