Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty Seeks to Acquire TikTok
Frank McCourt, the founder of Project Liberty and executive chairman of McCourt Global, has announced that Project Liberty is now organizing a bid to acquire TikTok in the U.S. with the goal of placing people and data empowerment at the center of the platform’s design and purpose.
Working in consultation with Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of Guggenheim Partners, and law firm Kirkland & Ellis as well as a consortium of technologists, academics, community leaders, parents and engaged citizens, this bid for TikTok offers an alternative vision for the platform’s infrastructure - one that allows people to reclaim agency over their digital identities and data by proposing to migrate the platform to a new digital open-source protocol.
“The foundation of our digital infrastructure is broken, and it’s time to fix it,” said McCourt. “We can, and must, do more to safeguard the health and well-being of our children, families, democracy and society. We see this potential acquisition as an incredible opportunity to catalyze an alternative to the current tech model that has colonized the internet. By bringing leading academics, technologists, behavioral scientists, psychologists and economic experts together with community partners, parents and citizens, we believe we can preserve – and enhance – the TikTok experience by giving individuals and creators on the platform the value and control they deserve regarding who has access to their data and how it is used. This country has long been the global driver of ground-breaking innovation, and I encourage anyone who’s interested in reclaiming your data from Big Tech to engage with us and take a step forward to redefine the future of the internet for the people.”
The vision this bid effort puts forward for TikTok is informed and supported by the work of Project Liberty, an effort dedicated to building a stronger, healthier internet infrastructure. Founded through a half-billion-dollar investment from McCourt, Project Liberty leverages the research and technology expertise of its Project Liberty Institute - a global nonprofit organization with a network of collaborators, including academic partners Georgetown University, Stanford University and Sciences Po as well as more than 90 civic organizations - and its technology labs team, which develops new and innovative solutions that aim to accelerate the transition to an open, inclusive data economy. Project Liberty’s activities include the release of the open-source Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), a piece of digital public infrastructure that will serve as the bedrock of a more equitable web and support a new era of innovation that empowers people over platforms and serves the common good.
This bid for TikTok – driven by Project Liberty’s vision for the tech future – has already mobilized a uniquely diverse coalition of experts, citizens and activists, who recognize the challenges posed by the current digital infrastructure and believe in innovative technology solutions to address them.
“When it comes to our society’s relationship with technology, we’re at a tipping point, and Frank McCourt and Project Liberty understand the urgency of this issue,” said Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of New York Times bestseller “The Anxious Generation. “Their vision for TikTok, redesigned for healthier dynamics, is the type of innovative solution needed to move ahead in the digital age. Social media is not going away, but it is evolving, and McCourt wants it to evolve in ways that are far less harmful to children and teens than it is today.”