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.
“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 AFP at the Collision tech conference in Toronto. McCourt said he was initially motivated to act by the threat posed by social media to his own seven children.
“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. Project Liberty counts internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee as a supporter, along with Jonathan Haidt, an NYU professor whose latest book, “The Anxious Generation,“ argues that the effects of social media on young people have been devastating.McCourt is not alone in eyeing the Chinese-owned platform, with Trump’s former secretary of the treasury, Steve Mnuchin, also advancing a bid.