Will the TikTok deal mean the app changes in the US?

Chinese TikTok owner ByteDance has signed an agreement with investors to operate its business in the United States.

But what does this mean for the more than 170 million Americans (or so the social media platform claims) who use the app?

The key may lie in how TikTok's recommendation algorithm—the powerful system that runs the platform's For You page to predict what content you might watch—is managed as it changes hands.

Social media industry expert Matt Navarra told the BBC that the question won't be whether TikTok will survive, but “which version of TikTok will survive.”

Currently, TikTok's system relies on massive amounts of global data and feedback loops that can change recommendations instantly.

Under the terms of the deal, the TikTok algorithm, which will be licensed by investor Oracle, will be retrained on data from American users.

Mr Navarra said this could make the app “safer and more reliable”, but it risks “becoming less culturally relevant” as a result.

“The power of TikTok always comes from a sense of some loss of control — weird, niche, awkward, sometimes politically edgy content for someone else or before it gets anywhere else,” he said.

“If you start to smooth out those edges, you're not just changing moderation. I think you will change its relevance.”

Whether the US version will be different from the TikTok many already know and use may also depend on whether it gets “all the new features, security updates and platform improvements” just like the international version, tech journalist Will Guyatt told the BBC.

And computer science expert Kokil Jaidka of the National University of Singapore said she expects the things that make the platform popular, such as short videos and shopping, will likely “remain untouched” because those features are not dependent on the algorithm.

She said the changes could be more subtle and gradual, depending on whether the narrower inputs of the “disaggregated” US version can match the app's global reach.

“If TikTok runs a licensed or partially simplified version of its recommendation algorithm, some of the system's blind spots may start to matter more,” she said.

For users, she said, this means that in practice the US algorithm may “lag behind in personalization” and take longer to adapt to viral content.

Oracle is TikTok's longtime cloud computing partner in the U.S. and its chairman is Larry Ellison, an ally of President Trump.

Another foreign entity, MGX, the Abu Dhabi government investment fund, will join along with private equity firm Silver Lake as major new investors.

Pressure from those investors could also make the U.S. app “tastier,” Mr. Navarra said.

“I think the real test will not be whether users leave,” he said.

“It will depend on whether TikTok continues to be seen as a place where the internet experiments, or whether it becomes a place where it behaves.”

Additional reporting by Peter Hoskins.