Former Dodgers Owner Has Big Plans for TikTok

Billionaire Frank McCourt is putting together a consortium to buy TikTok, and if he succeeds, it will definitely not be business as usual for the social media app. The former Los Angeles Dodgers owner aims to make TikTok part of his project to create "a more open, inclusive, and responsible internet." In a news release, McCourt's Project Liberty said the consortium plans to "rearchitect the platform" to put people in control of their own data. "The foundation of our digital infrastructure is broken, and it's time to fix it," McCourt said. "We can, and must, do more to safeguard the health and well-being of our children, families, democracy, and society."

• Tim Berners-Lee is on board. "This proposal has my support," Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, said in a statement. "The web I invented was to provide power and value to individuals, which they do not have at the moment. Users should have an ability to control their own data, to share it with other people and organizations as they choose." Other supporters include social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

• "A great opportunity." "This seemed like a great opportunity to actually create the alternative to the current internet, which has been colonized by large platforms and including TikTok," McCourt tells the New York Times. The deal, he says, could help users "control their identity, own and control their data."
• Preserving the experience. KTLA reports that the project aims to "preserve and enhance" the TikTok experience by giving creators more control over their data. McCourt says the effort will include "leading academics, technologists, behavioral scientists, psychologists, and economic experts together with community partners, parents, and citizens."
• Roadblocks. Under a law signed by President Biden last month, the app will be banned in the US if Chinese company ByteDance doesn't sell the platform. China is unlikely to permit the sale of TikTok's video recommendation algorithm, but McCourt says that's not a problem. "I doubt very much that China would sell TikTok with the algorithm," McCourt tells the Times. "We're the one bidder that doesn't want the algorithm because we're talking about a different architecture, a different way of thinking about the internet and how it operates."

(More TikTok stories.)