New York (CNN) — We’re approaching what appears to be an appropriately dumb ending to an inordinately dumb fight over TikTok.

Dumb is a harsh word, and I mean it deeply. The dumbest part: The Trump administration’s brokered solution to keep the app in the United States risks turning it into yet another once-great social media platform.

Here’s the latest, as of Monday:

The White House is brokering a deal for TikTok (or at least, a version of it) to be cleaved off from its Chinese parent company, Bytedance, and transferred to American ownership.
Who would own the US assets? So far, we know that Oracle, which already provides cloud storage in the US for TikTok, would take a stake and control a copy of the all-important algorithm Bytedance hands over. Other investors potentially include private equity firm Silver Lake, tech investing firm Andreesen Horowitz and the Murdoch-owned Fox Corp.
You don’t have to squint too hard to catch a theme here: Oracle was founded by Trump ally and mega-billionaire Larry Ellison, and it has been run for the past decade by another Trump ally, Safra Catz, who just stepped down Monday. Marc Andreesen is the MAGA face of Silicon Valley. The famously conservative Murdoch family owns a number of right-wing media outlets, including Fox News.
Under the deal, Oracle would, in cooperation with the government, monitor the US algorithm to “ensure content is free from improper manipulation or surveillance,” according to a senior White House official.
Key background: All of this is happening because former President Joe Biden passed a bipartisan bill US lawmakers passed, forcing the sale or ban of the video-sharing app in April of 2024, based on largely hypothetical national security concerns. The Supreme Court upheld the ban in January, and Trump has repeatedly extended the 90-day deadline for the ban or sale to take place while he negotiated a deal with Beijing.

In sum: Chances for potential Chinese manipulation of US data would be much lower. Chances for yet another right-wing takeover of a super popular social media app just went up exponentially.

There is still a lot we don’t know, including:

— What other investors are involved and how much are they shelling out?

— Will users have to download a new app?

The answers to those questions will be crucial if the American-owned TikTok is going to, like, work.

“For now, the deal is vaporware,” Alex Falcone, a comedian with more than 626,000 followers on TikTok, told me. “But obviously it doesn’t sound promising … TikTok is a finely balanced ecosystem, so if they come galumphing into it, they’ll kill all life in it overnight.”

TikTok’s new owners need to retain its 170 million scroll-happy users in the US if they intend to make money on it. And the investors named so far have mixed experience in social media. Oracle isn’t a consumer-facing tech company, though it has a longstanding relationship with TikTok, hosting its data. Murdoch’s News Corp. primarily owns legacy TV and and newspaper properties — it bought the early social media site MySpace in 2005, only to sell it at a loss in 2011. Silver Lake was an early Twitter investor, and Andreesen Horowitz invested in Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, among others.

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A shift in ownership has certainly hurt some platforms in the past. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he gutted the place, tore down the guardrails and welcomed neo-Nazi trolls to the platform, prompting users and advertisers to flee.

“While still speculative, we could see similar dynamics play out again,” Emarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg noted in an email Monday.

To be sure, Musk spent mostly his own money on Twitter and wasn’t accountable to shareholders, so it didn’t matter if he was lighting the money on fire. The TikTok deal would have to contend with the investors’ corporate board members, who have a fiduciary duty to ensure no one can take a pricey asset like TikTok and turn it into some kind of right-wing megaphone.

But TikTok is yet another massive audience that is about to spin closer to the MAGA-aligned media orbit. The Trump administration — which in just the past year has sued ABC, CBS, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal — and its corporate cheerleaders aren’t exactly hiding their desire to control mass media. (Just ask Jimmy Kimmel.)

Although Trump credits TikTok for a surge in Republican youth votes in 2024, TikTok’s users are mostly young and left-leaning. If a right-wing takeover of TikTok takes place, we could be in for a repeat of the Twitter saga, and a large number of TikTok users would likely rush the exits.

Content creators who rely on income from the app have had more than a year to prepare for its end, and many have been building up their follower bases on rival platforms like Reels, YouTube and even other Chinese-owned apps like Rednote — all of which saw traffic surge when TikTok briefly went offline earlier this year.

TikTok won’t be allowed to die if its core user base moves on. It’ll become a refuge for anyone, or any bot, to gin up the kind of engagement-bait and AI slop that now dominates Facebook and X.

The-CNN-Wire
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