TikTok is developing an app just for the US The solution to the diatribe with Trump?

TikTok will be banned in January 2025, the ban has been postponed, Flip is the new American competitor to TikTok, Donald Trump is forcing ByteDance to sell the app to the United States, TikTok is the new Vine. There have been many, too many, updates on the ban of the Chinese social media platform in America - changes that suddenly turned the app’s fate from irretrievable to uncertain, from safe to trapped. Perhaps precisely because it has had to witness an endless back-and-forth of decisions and delays, TikTok is now trying to take control of the situation by making a move that, if successful, could truly restore relations between the Chinese media company and the United States: an app designed specifically for American users, operating with an algorithm and data system completely separate from those used by TikTok. It took months to prepare, according to sources close to the matter cited by Reuters, as it required duplicating all the app’s codebase onto another platform. Also according to media reports, the project is called M2 and is expected to launch in September.

If the United States officially drops the TikTok issue and M2 succeeds in the country, it’s estimated that as many as 170 million American users will have to move from one platform to another. This is a massive shift both culturally - since users are consumers and creators - and commercially, considering these millions include content creators and brands who will have to start over or at least adapt to the new social media platform. The app is expected to operate independently from TikTok, like TikTok’s Chinese-only counterpart, Douyin. An interesting aspect concerns content from the “original” TikTok, since it is not yet clear whether what’s posted on the international app will also appear on M2. The U.S.-designed social media app will use only American data to update the algorithm, in order to avoid raising concerns about how the Chinese company handles users’ personal information. The recommended content - that is, what appears on the For You Page - will be mostly created on American soil.

The news that TikTok would disappear from Americans’ phones had shocked the country between 2024 and 2025, with creators starting to post even their archived content on their pages and other users beginning to sell on eBay phones that still had TikTok (this happened when the app was effectively removed from App Stores). For this reason, we cannot predict how the more than half of U.S. citizens currently on TikTok will respond to the M2 news. The data issue remains unresolved, although after the January crisis ByteDance had begun isolating American data on Oracle, a U.S.-based data center, to ensure that American material was separated from the rest. The team working on the algorithm and app development will still be TikTok’s, reports Reuters, but in this case, it will be a separate division. Finally, the app will not be owned solely by ByteDance, as required by Washington, but also by an American investment consortium including Susquehanna International Group (SIG), General Atlantic, KKR, Blackstone, and Andreessen Horowitz. The tech company that owns TikTok will hold a minority stake in M2.