TikTok gets board member of NSA or CIA according to deal

TikTok will probably have an employee of an intelligence service such as NSA or CIA in a new board of directors. Axios reports this on the basis of the preliminary deal. The United States government is given the right to approve or disapprove the board of directors.

That board of directors is probably within parent company ByteDance, according to information from Axios. The site has received information from a source from the twenty-page proposal, which ByteDance and Oracle want to prevent a US ban on TikTok. President Donald Trump has set a deadline for this on Sunday. If he doesn’t agree to the deal, he will ban TikTok in the US.

Not only will ByteDance’s board of directors have control over TikTok’s security and privacy issues, Oracle as a partner company will have exclusive access to TikTok’s source code and algorithms to check for backdoors.

In addition, ByteDance and Oracle are establishing TikTok Global, which will operate TikTok worldwide and of which American companies own a share. The New York Times reports that the companies approached Instagram founder Kevin Systrom to direct that. Systrom left Instagram parent Facebook in 2018 and has years of experience leading a more or less independent social medium within a larger parent company.

The Trump administration is currently reviewing Oracle’s deal with ByteDance. Oracle’s director is Larry Ellison, a supporter of US President Trump. The close ties between Oracle and the government have given the company a hand in the process, claims The New York Times. The government has often been accused in recent years of favoring family and friends of the president and of penalizing enemies. For example, Amazon claims that the award of the tender to build cloud services from the Pentagon went to Microsoft because Amazon owner Jeff Bezos has a newspaper Trump hates.