American billionaire Frank McCourt, owner of Olympique de Marseille, plans to buy TikTok to save the internet from the clutches of large social networks which, according to him, are destroying society and putting children in danger.
Known in the United States as the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, the real estate mogul has been protesting for years against the control of tech giants who “manipulate us”.
“And that’s why we see everywhere in free societies that the world is going badly,” he said in an interview with AFP, referring to the rise of the far right in France which could win a majority seats in the next legislative elections.
“There’s a lot of unrest, a lot of chaos, a lot of polarization. But the algorithms work well. They keep us in this constant state,” explains the billionaire before adding that “it’s time to change that.”
“We are seeing cases of anxiety, depression and a real wave of suicides among children,” he points out on the sidelines of the Collision technology conference in Toronto.
Faced with these challenges, the billionaire is campaigning for a “new internet” which, according to him, would regain control of the web from large platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or X.
“These platforms have hundreds of thousands of individual attributes on each of us,” explains the septuagenarian, referring to our habits, our location, but also our “way of thinking, our emotions, our reactions, our behavior” .
Conversely, his vision of a new internet would result in an open source system, a decentralized protocol where users control their own data, regardless of the social networks they use.
Project Liberty counts among its supporters internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, as well as Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University whose latest book, The Anxious Generation, argues that the effects of social media on young people are devastating.
But the American billionaire is not the only one to covet the social network, whose parent company ByteDance is Chinese. Donald Trump’s former Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, has also expressed interest.
“Washington fears that the data of 170 million Americans could be collected and sent to China, which of course constitutes a threat to national security,” said Frank McCourt.
However, it is not certain that the social network will eventually be put up for sale. The company is currently challenging the law in U.S. courts, and Beijing has said it would not agree to hand over the product from one of the country’s largest technology companies.
Even if this sale does not go through, Frank McCourt hopes that the subject will allow “people to realize that their data is being collected and sent somewhere”, even on other platforms.
“Maybe they’re not going to China, but they’re going somewhere controlled by someone who has everything on you, and that’s not right. It’s undemocratic,” he says.
