Neal Freiman

It caps off a nearly seven-year saga in which the US forced ByteDance to divest its American TikTok operations over concerns that the Chinese government would use the video app to spy on its 200 million American users and influence public opinion.

To assuage those concerns, TikTok says, American tech giant Oracle will protect user data in a secure cloud data environment regularly audited by third-party cybersecurity experts.

But here's where critics say ByteDance got one over the White House.

TikTok's algorithm, considered the crown jewel of its entire business, will still belong to ByteDance, which is going to license it to the U.S.

TikTok.

And not only will ByteDance continue to own the algorithm,

It will, quote, manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.

Or in other words, they still control the app's core operations.

Toby, this isn't as clean of a break that was initially expected.

Now you're Morning Brew Daily's social media whisperer.

Like, where do you see TikTok going from here?

What's its business prospects?

I mean, actually, from a financial perspective, it's absolutely crushing it as 200 million users just in the US alone.

ByteDance, more broadly, is going to post a $50 billion profit for 2025.

That rivals Meta.

So this company is doing really well from a financial perspective.

But after this seven year long drama, are people still going to be using TikTok?

It had this remarkable growth trajectory.

And some in the industry are saying, I think Instagram, once again, may have killed another app.

Josh Kaplan, who's our friend who used to work at Morning Brew and is now very, very involved in the creator space.