A glimpse at an alternative TikTok

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With help from Derek Robertson

TikTok is heading into an uncertain future.

While the company has been busy fighting what it calls an unconstitutional federal law forcing its Beijing-based owner to sell the app or face a U.S. ban, potential buyers have been lining up.

Famously, one is Donald Trump’s former Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who said in March that he’s assembling a group of investors to buy TikTok, and reiterated his interest last month after the law passed. Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary has also expressed interest — but only if he can get it for $20 or $30 billion, at a 90 percent discount from TikTok’s estimated value of $100 billion.

A very different potential buyer recently joined the fray — billionaire real-estate mogul and philanthropist Frank McCourt. The former Los Angeles Dodgers owner, who has become one of big tech platforms’ most vocal critics, is now also trying to buy one of the largest social media apps in the world.

In May, he said he was forming a “people’s bid” to transform TikTok into a platform that would allow users to have more control over their data — and, hopefully, draw the app’s 170 million U.S. users onto his new digital open-source protocol run by his non-profit called Project Liberty.

As part of his campaign, McCourt hosted a breakfast for the media on Wednesday at the five-star Jefferson Hotel in Washington to highlight the latest group of supporters for his bid — parents who have lost children to harms tied to social media.

The event featured four parents who spoke about how their children died following social media challenges and cyberbullying on other social-media platforms like Snapchat and YouTube. They had reached out to McCourt to back his effort to reform TikTok into a safer platform.

McCourt’s TikTok pursuit is part of his ongoing crusade to recreate the internet and social media — a $500 million initiative called “Project Liberty” to make the online landscape more civil, and more decent, via a Web 3.0 decentralized internet. He recently released a book about the idea of building a healthier internet that “frees users from Big Tech’s exploitation.”

So… how does TikTok fit in? One of the biggest challenges for the most potential buyers of TikTok is the Chinese government’s refusal to sell the app’s powerful algorithm — the secret sauce that serves each user a customized stream of videos, and makes the app so valuable in the first place.

But unlike other bidders, McCourt is fine with that. “We don’t want the algorithm. We don’t need the algorithm. So we’re a non-threatening buyer,” he said Wednesday.

Instead, he’s interested in migrating TikTok’s massive user base, scale and technology — without the algorithm — to Project Liberty’s decentralized social media protocol. (With just shy of 1 million people participating so far, it is far smaller than most social networks.) Its protocol establishes a shared social network that’s not dependent on a specific application or a centralized platform.

“I’m interested in compressing time,” McCourt told POLITICO in an interview after the event. “We see the harms that are being done more and more on a daily basis. So we’re up against the clock.”

He’s already brought in financial advisers at the investment bank Guggenheim Securities. He told reporters Wednesday that since his announcement, he’s been approached by an “eclectic” group of parents, academics, technologists, pension funds and philanthropies who are interested in his bid.

He also wants existing American investors to continue to be part of what he’s calling TikTok 2.0, or jokingly “TokTik.”

McCourt said he’s also meeting with officials at the White House, lawmakers and federal regulators to discuss the bid — but declined to share specifics with POLITICO.

There are a lot of uncertainties — will the law hold up in court? Would ByteDance ever actually sell the U.S. version of the app? Could you keep an audience while ditching the algorithm that hooks them?

But McCourt said he’s confident that people would opt for his decentralized platform “where they have a voice, they have choice, they have a stake in the economics,” versus the existing model that he calls addictive, harmful and vacuous, “I think people are really smart. And they’ll choose the latter,” he said.