Frank H. McCourt Jr., a successful real estate developer, has expressed his desire to rebuild the Internet, aiming to create a safer environment for children.
Frank, who previously owned the Los Angeles Dodgers and is a father of seven, has invested $500 million in his nonprofit organization, Project Liberty.
This organization has developed a framework for social media apps to operate on, known as a decentralized social networking protocol (DSNP).
The DSNP is designed to safeguard users’ privacy.
In response to a bill passed by Congress in April, which mandated the shutdown or sale of U.S. TikTok, Project Liberty is sponsoring a bid to acquire the American arm of the company.
Frank recently spoke with People about Project Liberty’s plans to save TikTok and reshape the future of social media.
Check out a few excerpts:
Why buy TikTok?
We don’t want to see TikTok shut down, and we don’t want the algorithm. We want it to continue with different architecture. We’ve built the technology. But building the technology for an alternative Internet turned out to be not as difficult as getting people to migrate to it. Nearly a million people now use Project Liberty’s technology [on social media platform MeWe], where they control their identity. But a million isn’t enough to compete with the current Internet. We saw TikTok as an opportunity to move 170 million users to this alternative Internet. I believe that once there’s scale to this alternative, people will migrate in droves.
How realistic is Project Liberty’s bid for TikTok? ByteDance, the company’s Chinese owner, is suing to prevent the sale — and has said it will shut down before selling. And Project Liberty isn’t the only one lining up to try to buy the company.
I think it’s very realistic, or I wouldn’t be leading this bid. I’m a business person. Some people do think that the Chinese government will just shut it down and not sell. But there’s a lot of American capital invested in TikTok that would get wiped out, and I think people would prefer to see some value for the capital they’ve invested. Our best bet is that there will be a divestment of U.S. TikTok, and we want to be in a position to purchase it on behalf of Project Liberty. Project Liberty is sponsoring this bid and providing all of the seed capital and assembling the experts necessary to make it happen. But I certainly don’t want to be the CEO of a social media platform. I am far more interested in catalyzing an alternative internet than I am owning TikTok myself. I think the 170 million users should be part-owners.
Most social media companies make money by mining users’ data. The new version of TikTok that you, and Project Liberty, propose wouldn’t allow for that. Would this new version instead charge users of the platform? If not, how could your TikTok 2.0 be profitable?
Advertising will still exist in this new architecture, but people will be able to control what data they share and the terms on which they share it. We hope to shift the web from an attention economy to an intention economy, where people have much more control over their feed and more ability to curate the content and ads they see.
In this re-imagined TikTok, people can feel more secure controlling their data and even exercise some leverage with it, so fairer exchanges can occur. “You want my data? Okay, I’d like 5% off your product.” Advertisers currently waste about a third of their total spending – many billions of dollars – paying for ads that go to bots or uninterested consumers. A platform where data is trusted and users are real humans, not bots, would be a dream for advertisers. It would transform a system where you’re constantly spied on and manipulated into a trusted marketplace where people signal what they want (rather than being targeted), advertisers recoup wasted dollars, and ultimately everyone benefits. TikTok would still be wildly profitable, but without exploiting people.
For the full interview, click here.
