US real estate billionaire Frank McCourt, known for previously owning the Los Angeles Dodgers, wants to buy TikTok to positively influence the direction of the world’s youth. “This internet is predatory. It’s doing a lot of damage to kids. We see the anxiety, the depression, and an epidemic now of children taking their lives,” he said.
McCourt, who currently owns the famed soccer club Olympique de Marseille in France, wants to use his fortune to make a bid in the upcoming government-mandated sale of social media platform TikTok. Following the Congressional ban of the app, approved by President Joe Biden, the Chinese-owned company ByteDance will be forced to sell it if there is no successful legal challenge against the decision.
“We are being manipulated by these big platforms. And that’s why we see in free societies everywhere, there’s sort of the world on fire, right?” McCourt told Agence Free Presse at the Collision tech conference. He has been against the powers of big tech for years, but not necessarily from a conservative perspective: he complained to the French media outlet about the rise of the so-called “far-right” in recent European elections, blaming it partially on social media.
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“There’s a lot of agitation, a lot of chaos, a lot of polarization. Well, you know what, the algorithms are working well. They’re keeping us in that constant state. It’s time for change,” he continued, saying he is motivated to do something by his seven children.
McCourt calls for a “new internet” to take away power from the major social media platforms and their algorithms. He wants users to have control over their own data through “an open-source, decentralized protocol.”
“These platforms have hundreds of thousands of individual attributes about each of us. And it’s not just where we shop or what we like to eat or where we physically are present. It’s about how we think, how we emote, how we react, how we behave,” he said.
McCourt’s organization to effect this end, “Project Liberty,” will make use of TikTok as a test case should he successfully purchase the app. Joining the Project Liberty initiative is internet regulation advocate Tim Berners-Lee and author of The Anxious Generation Jonathan Haidt.
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics and business for VT and a regular guest on The Unusual Suspects. Follow Shane’s work here.
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