WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The White House announced Tuesday that most of the Trump administration’s Cabinet members opened accounts on social video platform TikTok, underscoring the administration’s inconsistent approach to Chinese influence in the United States.
“The memes. The hype. The patriotism. The Cabinet is on TikTok. New platform, same energy,” The White House’s official X account announced Tuesday.
The memes. The hype. The patriotism.
The Cabinet is on TikTok. New platform, same energy. 🔥🦅 pic.twitter.com/zBmYchwEJa
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 21, 2026
Axios reported that the move follows a Justice Department directive that federal employees are now allowed to download TikTok on government devices after its ownership ostensibly changed hands last year despite lingering questions about how much influence the Chinese government retains over it.
In April 2024, former President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which forbids applications controlled by a “foreign adversary” from operating within the United States, “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing.” It was motivated primarily by TikTok Chinese parent company ByteDance’s links to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its military and surveillance operations, sparking national-security concerns over the Chinese regime’s ability to use TikTok to collect personal data on American users and influence American opinion.
The law, which was unanimously upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, placed a January 19, 2025, deadline for ByteDance to sell off TikTok’s American operations or see the app shut down in the United States, but after returning to office, President Donald Trump issued multiple extensions of the deadline despite the law only allowing for a single 90-day extension, subject to a concrete divestment proposal being on the table.
In September 2025, Trump signed an executive order approving a deal billed as placing TikTok under predominantly American control, allegedly resolving the situation. Under the terms, it said, “TikTok’s United States application will be operated by a newly established joint venture based in the United States. It will be majority-owned and controlled by United States persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary, since ByteDance Ltd. and its affiliates will own less than 20 percent of the entity, with the remainder being held by certain investors (Investor Parties). This new joint venture will be run by a new board of directors and subject to rules that appropriately protect Americans’ data and our national security.”
According to an accompanying White House fact sheet, the agreement “puts the operation of the algorithm, code, and content moderation decisions under the control of the new joint venture” and “prohibits the storage of sensitive U.S. user data in a manner that would allow such data to be under the control of a foreign adversary. All U.S. user data will be stored in a trusted, secure, and purpose-built cloud environment in the United States run by Oracle”; and “includes intense monitoring of software updates, the algorithm, and data flows, and it requires all recommendation models, including algorithms, that use U.S. user data to be retrained and monitored by America’s trusted security partners.”
However, it was unclear whether ByteDance retaining even a small stake in TikTok satisfies the requirements of the law. Business Insider noted at the time that another “big” question is “who exactly is getting TikTok. While it will be a consortium of investors, the exact makeup of the group wasn’t disclosed. Trump said “‘four or five world-class investors’ are involved, including Michael Dell, Rupert Murdoch, and Larry Ellison.”
Unveiled in January, the final deal established TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC under majority-American control, with Adam Presser as CEO and data protection and algorithm security overseen by Texas-based cloud computing giant Oracle. But critics warned the new arrangement did not truly cut off China’s influence.
“Policy experts who have been monitoring TikTok’s influence over American society for years warn that the deal does not disrupt the CCP’s ability to propagandize young Americans, given that ByteDance will remain in control of the algorithm that feeds personalized recommendations to user feeds,” National Review reported at the time. “Plus, the new U.S. entity will be run by Presser, who served as TikTok’s head of operations while the platform was feeding American users lopsided information on issues of international importance like the war in Gaza and the Hong Kong freedom movement.”
The Trump administration’s latest embrace of TikTok comes less than a week after the president delivered a primetime speech accusing China of the “largest compromise of election data in history” in the 2020 election. Critics argue the gravity of such allegations is undermined by moves such as preserving TikTok, approving the sale of advanced microchips to China, and supporting visas for more than 600,000 Chinese students to study in the United States.
Asked Tuesday if he planned to impose consequences on China for its alleged 2020 activities, Trump downplayed the situation. “Well, we’ll talk to them about it,” he said. “It took place a long time ago. I think China is maybe a little bit different today than it was then. But look, they do things, and we do things to them. We do things to them, too. It’s not a one-way street. But we’ll be talking to them.”
In the final year of Trump’s first term, he levied sanctions against TikTok and supported banning it as well but during his 2024 campaign reversed his position days after meeting with GOP megadonor and TikTok shareholder Jeff Yass. Supporters argued at the time that finding a way to preserve the platform was critical to drawing the youth vote.