US billionaire eyes TikTok takeover to save Internet from Big Tech

TORONTO, Canada – Frank McCourt, a US real estate billionaire, aims to buy TikTok to rescue the Internet from the clutches of major platforms that he firmly believes are destroying society and endangering children.

In the United States, Mr McCourt is best known as the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, while in Europe he is the current proprietor of storied football club Olympique de Marseille, which counts French President Emmanuel Macron among its fans.

For years, Mr McCourt has railed against the power of the big tech platforms, accusing them of harming children and helping send the world off the rails.

“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?” Mr McCourt told AFP, at the Collision tech conference in Toronto.

He cited political upheaval in France, where the far-right could secure a decisive victory in the upcoming parliamentary elections, as the latest example.

“There’s a lot of agitation, a lot of chaos, a lot of polarisation. Well, you know what, the algorithms are working well. They’re keeping us in that constant state. It’s time for change.”

Mr McCourt said he was initially motivated to act by the threat posed by social media to his own seven children.

“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.

To address the problem, Mr McCourt is campaigning for a “new Internet” which, he claims, would wrest control of the web away from major platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or X.

“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.

Mr McCourt envisions a new Internet that he describes as an open-source, decentralised protocol where users control their own data, regardless of the social media app they use.

Acquiring TikTok would give his project known as Project Liberty a whole new scale, bringing in its legions of users, mostly younger people, he said.