American billionaire Frank McCourt, owner of French club Marseilleintends to acquire TikTok to save the Internet from the ‘claws’ of large social networks, which it accuses of 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 technology giants.
“And that’s why we see everywhere in free societies that the world is going wrong”, he denounced today, in an interview with the France-Presse agency (AFP), referring to the rise of the extreme right in France, which could conquer the majority of seats in the next legislative elections.
“There is a lot of turmoil, a lot of chaos, a lot of polarization, but the algorithms work well. They keep us in this constant state”, stressed the billionaire, adding that “it’s time to change that”.
Regarding this distrust in the Internet, which he describes as ‘predatory’, Frank McCourt attributes it to the dangers that these platforms represent for his seven children.
“We are seeing cases of anxiety, depression and a real wave of suicides among children,” he warned, on the sidelines of the Collision technology conference in Toronto.
In the face of challenges, the billionaire campaigns for a “new Internet” which, he argues, would regain control of the web from large platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or.
“These platforms have hundreds of thousands of individual attributes of each one of us”, highlighted the septuagenarian, referring to our habits, our location, but also to our “way of thinking, our emotions, our reactions, the our behavior.”
On the other hand, 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 Projeto Liberdade, a new scale thanks to the contribution of millions of users, most of them young, he emphasized.
The Freedom Project counts Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee among its supporters, as well as New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, 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.
These proposals, which some consider absurd, were made public following 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 from the country.
“Washington fears that the data of 170 million Americans could be recovered and sent to China, which obviously constitutes a threat to national security,” said Frank McCourt.
However, it is not certain that the social network will end up being put up for sale. The company is currently challenging the law in US courts and Beijing has said it will not agree to hand over one of the country’s largest technology companies.
Even if this sale does not materialize, Frank McCourt hopes that the matter 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 over you, and that’s not normal. It’s undemocratic,” he reiterated.