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 this is why we see everywhere in free societies that the world is going badly,” he declared 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.”
This distrust of the internet, which he describes as “predatory”, Frank McCourt attributes to the dangers that these platforms pose to his seven children.
“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.
“Open source”
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” .
PHOTO ANTONIN UTZ, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Frank McCourt is concerned about the dangers that platforms like TikTok pose to society, particularly young people.
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.
The acquisition of TikTok would give his project, known as Project Liberty, a new scale thanks to the contribution of millions of users, most of them young people, he emphasizes.
Project Liberty counts among its backers internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, as well as New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, whose latest book, The Anxious Generationargues that the effects of social media on young people are devastating.
“Undemocratic”
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.
These proposals, which some consider far-fetched, follow a bill signed by US President Joe Biden in April, which gives TikTok 270 days to find a non-Chinese buyer or risk being banned in the country.
“Washington fears that the data of 170 million Americans could be recovered and sent to China, which of course constitutes a threat to national security,” estimates 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 will not agree to hand over the product of 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 normal. It’s undemocratic,” he says.