The consolidation of the sale of the company that controls the TikTok platform in the United States, one of the biggest businesses of the Chinese unicorn company ByteDance, should be consolidated this Thursday (22). 
The operation was carried out under strong pressure from the United States government and dates back to Trump’s first term, being one of the recurring themes in his second campaign for the White House. The Chinese government took on the business as a way of maintaining good commercial relations.
In practice, decision-making power and data control leaves the hands of the Chinese – who will still have a 20% stake – and passes to companies aligned with the Trump administration and allies, such as the MGX fund, owned by the United Arab Emirates royal family, and Oracle, a United States company that will manage data storage.
The transaction is estimated at US$14 billion, according to the American vice president, James Vance. TikTok is the fourth largest platform in the United States, with around 170 million users.
“There is a paradox there because the United States, with this movement of economic neoliberalism, uses at the same time the justification of national security to be able to control the data of its population. It affects, at the same time, the free market and also freedom of expression, which was often questioned as there was a threat to close the platform”, assessed Andressa Michelotti, a specialist in regulation and disinformation.
>> Follow the channel Brazil Agency on WhatsApp
According to Andressa, who is also a researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the University of Utrecht, the power game is not just about controlling the data.
The name leading Oracle’s participation in the business is Larry Ellison, who has been called brolygarchthat is, large businesspeople aligned with the interests and partners of government officials. Trump has surrounded himself with some of them, such as the former president of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, and his ally during the beginning of his government and owner of SpaceX, Elon Musk.
The forced acquisition ignored ByteDance’s claims that the company operated transparently and independently from the Chinese government, which has a smaller stake, while 60% of the capital is open to international funds such as Blackrock, General Atlantic and Susquehanna.
Another 20% of TikTok’s capital is spread among its employees, including the 7,000 American employees. The remaining 20% is owned by the founders, the only known one being Zhang Yiming.
Despite the company denying state control, the Beijing government spoke out about the so-called TikTok War:
“The Chinese government hopes that the relevant parties can reach a solution regarding TikTok that complies with Chinese laws and regulations and achieves a balance of interests,” Ministry of Commerce spokesperson He Yongqian said in December when the negotiation was announced.
Different servers and application
Among the information, sometimes conflicting, that circulates in the specialized media in the United States is that the change would not only be to servers but to the application itself, with unknown impacts in relation to the structure of the platform, its appearance and functionalities. As with Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and his move to X, there are a number of uncertainties and possibilities.
“How does this TikTok break up in the United States? Then comes a nationalization, which leaves a separate platform, or will it still have an architecture that communicates in some way with the platform in other countries? Then comes another question, what is the transition of this data from one place to another like?”, asks Andressa, for whom balkanization (isolation on local platforms) is one of the possible paths, among others.
The questions also include how data from users in the United States will be accessed on servers outside their territory, such as Europe, China or Latin America, as well as the reverse.
“It could be that TikTok becomes a completely different company, even less interesting. It could be that they put another designother elements, may be more mirrored on other American platforms. This will influence other platforms as well. design and architecture. It’s not just changing an algorithmic key and that’s it, it’s nationalized. There are content moderators, platform policies, what can and cannot be done”, ponders the UFMG researcher.
The answer will essentially depend on how the new company will deal with transparency.
Tik Tok already operates in local companies, including due to national regulations. There is a company, for example, for operations in the United Kingdom; another in the United States and another here in Brazil.
This situation already leads to a conflict regarding the ways to conduct business, which also occurs in other media, such as Instagram, Discord or X.
There is a relationship between the architecture of controlling companies and local legislation that is important for defining moderation policies, data protection and responding to national legal demands, but which also results in content moderation controversies, pressure against certain positions or even expulsion of users.
An example of this is Tik Tok’s adaptation to content moderation for children under 13 in Europe. According to Chinese state media company CGTN, the platform will begin a content moderation policy for this audience from next week, following controversy involving cases of self-harm motivated by content on its servers.
The details of this other policy are being revealed little by little, but there is already talk of banning users after human review of content considered abusive by the security mechanism, which will operate based on automatic scanning.
How is the platform in Brazil?
According to ByteDance, the change in the United States will not change the company’s plans and actions in other countries, including Brazil.
“The new Joint Venture is specific to TikTok’s operations in the United States and does not impact the experience in Brazil”, says a note from the TikTok developer.
“The forced sale of TikTok’s operation in the United States should not be read as a model to be replicated in Brazil, because at the moment this would be unfeasible, given the political strength of the country and the reality of the social media market in Brazil. But it brings an important lesson for the regulatory and internet governance debate”, explains Rafael Evangelista, professor of the Postgraduate Program in Scientific and Cultural Dissemination at Unicamp and elected advisor to CGI.br, where he represents the technical-scientific sector.
For Evangelista, the case shows that Digital platforms play a central role in mediating public debate and are too relevant to function solely under market logic or exclusively under the control of the companies that operate them.
“We cannot forget Edward Snowden’s revelations, back in 2013, which showed the cooperation between social media platforms and the American State in building a global espionage system”, continues the professor.
Rafael Evangelista believes that for Brazil, the discussion involves less extreme measures and more reflection on technological, digital and political sovereignty. Among these reflections is the importance of dialogue between the State and companies that control strategic communication infrastructures.
“Where these companies are headquartered, who they respond to and what geopolitical interests they represent are factors that matter when thinking about regulation, governance and combating disinformation. Digital platforms, in general, have acquired an important centrality and power and, by intermediating communications in society, they are capable of guiding, in an invisible way, the conduct of public debate.”
For the professor, the response from the United States and, in particular, from the Trump administration, is precisely to this question: a Chinese company with so much penetration could represent a threat to the direction that the USA wants to follow, in the public debate.
US House passes bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face ban. Photo: Solen Feyissa/Flickr – Solen Feyissa/Flickr
data center
In Brazil, ByteDance is in the process of expanding local infrastructure. On the 15th, construction work began on the new data center dedicated to TikTok, in Caucaia, Ceará.
The project will be built, developed and operated by the company OMNIA, an arm of Grupo Pátria, owned by Alexandre Saigh, in the data centers. Pátria’s investors include several funds, such as Blackrock, which also participates in TikTok.
The structure, with 200 Megawatt (MW) dedicated to processing, is expected to be the largest in Latin America and will cost around R$200 billion. It will be powered by its own solar and wind energy farm, taking advantage of the state’s generation potential.
The sector awaits the vote, perhaps in 2026, on the Digital Competition Bill (PL 4675/2025), which deals with competitive markets.
Among the government’s proposals is giving the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) the ability to mediate business in the area, with the creation of a Digital Markets Superintendency (SMD).
Last year, Congress approved the Law 15,211/2025known as PL of ECA Digital, which establishes how platforms must deal with children’s information on social networks and other pages.
