TORONTO, June 24 — Frank McCourt, an American real estate billionaire, aims to buy TikTok to save the internet from the clutches of major platforms he firmly believes are destroying society and endangering children.
In the United States, McCourt is best known as the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, while in Europe he is the current owner of the famous soccer club Olympique de Marseille that counts French President Emmanuel Macron among its fans. .
For years, McCourt has railed against the power of big tech platforms, accusing them of harming children and helping to derail the world.
“We are being manipulated by these big platforms. And that’s why we see in free societies everywhere, there’s a kind of world on fire, right?” McCourt told AFP at the Collision technology conference in Toronto.
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He cited the political turmoil in France, where the far right could secure a decisive victory in the upcoming parliamentary elections, as the latest example.
“There is a lot of agitation, a lot of chaos, a lot of polarization. Well, you know what, the algorithms are working fine. They are keeping us in that constant state. It’s time for a change.”
McCourt said he was initially motivated to act by the threat posed by social media to his seven children.
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“This internet is predatory. It is doing a lot of harm to the children. We see anxiety, depression and an epidemic now of children taking their own lives,” he said.
To address the problem, McCourt is campaigning for a “new internet” which, he claims, would wrest control of the internet from major platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or X.
“These platforms have hundreds of thousands of individual attributes for each of us. And it’s not just where we shop or what we like to eat or where we’re physically present. It’s about how we think, how we emote, how we react, how we behave,” he said.
McCourt envisions a new Internet that he describes as an open-source, decentralized protocol where users control their data regardless of the social media app they use.
Buying TikTok would give his project known as Project Liberty a whole new scale, bringing in its legions of mostly young users, he said.
The Liberty Project counts as backers Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, along with Jonathan Haidt, an NYU professor whose latest book, The Anxiety Generationargues that the effects of social media on young people have been devastating.
‘undemocratic’
McCourt is not the only one eyeing the Chinese-owned platform, with former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin also advancing a bid.
The plans, which some say are far-fetched, follow a bill signed by US President Joe Biden in April that gives TikTok 270 days to find a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban in place.
However, it is not certain that TikTok will end up being sold.
The company is fighting the law in US courts, and the Chinese government has said it would not accept the sale of one of the country’s most successful technology brands.
“The US government’s concern is that the data of 170 million Americans is being scraped and sent to China,” which “obviously” poses a threat to national security, McCourt said.
However, he added, “I hope this TikTok issue will make that light bulb go off for people and they will realize (that even on other platforms) their data is being hidden and sent somewhere.”
“Maybe it won’t go to China, but it will go somewhere controlled by someone who has everything for you, and that’s not right. This is undemocratic,” he said. – AFP
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