Why Frank McCourt thinks buying TikTok could help save the internet

The way Frank McCourt sees it, acquiring TikTok from its parent company ByteDance isn’t just about nabbing a buzzy social media platform: It’s a step toward building a fairer internet.



The billionaire is spearheading a bid to buy the social media app from ByteDance, which faces a divest-or-ban proposition from the U.S. government. To McCourt, TikTok offers a chance to implement his ideas around data on a bigger scale and show how we might rethink data and privacy on the internet. (That’s if he’s able to close the deal: McCourt is already facing competition for the app from former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and ByteDance has sued to block the law .)



Though McCourt is perhaps best known as the chairman of McCourt Global (and for his ownership stint with the Los Angeles Dodgers), since 2021 he’s been chairman of Project Liberty , a nonprofit that seeks to give people ownership of their own data. Project Liberty’s success hinges on its Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), a blockchain-built open-source infrastructure that lets users—rather than networks—determine when and how their data can be deployed. DSNP users can also remain anonymous, though self-identification can at times be required in exchange for access to various networkers and channels. Last year, the social platform MeWe migrated its backend tech as well as 700,000 of its 20 million users over to DSNP. And now McCourt’s got his sights set on TikTok.



To describe his discomfort with the internet’s data practices, Frank McCourt likes to use the analogy of the U.S. Post Office: It’s as if, he says, the postmaster general offered free mail service in exchange for unfettered access to all your letters and your family’s letters. “You’d say ‘creepy, unfair, and harmful,’” he says. “That’s what is happening with our data.”



I met with McCourt in late May at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Austin. Seated in an airy lounge overlooking the Colorado River, we discussed TikTok, DSNP, and the discordance between our policymakers and our technologists. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.



You’ve been a vocal critic of Big Tech’s data practices. When did you first become concerned about what’s happening with our data?



There wasn’t a singular moment. I watched how this all emerged from 2004 to 2012, when Facebook was starting. Then there was the “like” button , and this rapid growth of social media. Social went from being a cool thing to be able to communicate to something very different that was very performance-based; where the more extreme the behavior, the more likes. You could see where this was going, where it could be highly disruptive, because it was a powerful technology connecting lots of people that wasn’t built or designed to do all the things that it was doing.



I initially thought that getting policymakers more engaged in this would be a way to steer things in a better direction. But I helped start the public policy school at Georgetown and learned quickly that the policymaking apparatus is really no match for the speed of technology and its scale.



I met with a faculty member there. She had a theory that you could predict large-scale human migration by seeing certain words amplified on social media. And our government was very interested in that; if you could know in advance that millions of people are going to migrate, that’s a massive benefit to humanitarian organizations and will save lots of lives. The government gave her a grant of roughly $200,000 to do that work. She knew Twitter had the information that she was looking for, and she went to them to ask if she could have it. And they confirmed they had the information, but said if she wanted it she had to pay them $100,000. She said, “If I pay you $100,000, I’ll have the data but I won’t be able to do my project.” She had to improvise and she built her model but it would have been so much richer and more helpful had she had access to this data. Zoom out now and think about that for a second: Here are the most vulnerable amongst us and an academic looking to do a project for the common good, and Twitter says no on the data.



That anecdote was very revealing to me; I saw the whole thing is completely upside-down. The people who created the data should get to decide who gets to use it; it shouldn’t be somebody who just happened to collect it. So, I began to really think about how this could be flipped so that the power dynamic shifts to people. Our data is our personhood in this day and age; we should own our personhood.



There’s the inherent creepiness, which is that large corporations know everything about our online footprint. But I think a lot of people feel a general sense of confusion , if not resignation, around their data. How do you convey the downstream effects of that data collection to the general public?



I think you need to have an alternative. We’re not giving up the internet, we’re all dependent on it. We need choice so that people can say, “Oh, in this version of the internet, I have say? In this version, I can give permission for my data?” Even if people begin to understand that their data is their personhood in the digital world, until there’s an alternative it’s like, “Okay, what can I do? This is the way it is.”



Thomas Paine was an inspiration because he took a very complicated situation that people didn’t realize, that they could live as citizens. They were subjects; and if you’re a subject, that’s all you know: You’re born, you live a life, you die, and that’s the life your kids will lead. We’re losing our citizenship in this digital world, we’re becoming subjects again.



In your book , you said that a Decentralized Social Networking Protocol would encourage prosocial behaviors among users. What would prosocial behavior look like on the internet?



We already have a social web. It is operating on the network effect of our combined social graph information, and that’s in the hands of a few platforms. What the DSNP allows is more individuals to control their identity in this digital world. Putting individuals back in charge of themselves, we now have the same set of issues that we all had in the pre-internet era: We have these rights: How we use those rights and how we protect those rights still matter. Because if I say, I have a certain set of rights—choice, autonomy, individuality, liberty, freedom, etc.—they don’t mean anything unless I respect those same rights in you. That’s a social contract. The DSNP returns the power to us as individuals, but how we respect those rights in other people is really important. That’s what we mean by prosocial behavior.



It’s very hard to have prosocial behavior or positive social behavior if we’re just puppets in a puppet show. The platforms have so much information and know how to predict how we’ll react to an ad, news feed, or anything else. It’s super unhealthy for society and I think will be the end of democracy as we know it, the end of capitalism as we know it, if we don’t return the power here to individuals and give both choices and responsibility.



Project Liberty migrated MeWe over to its DSNP infrastructure last year, and you’ve personally invested in the social network. MeWe also became popular with extremists during the 2020 election. How would DSNP offer an improvement over the status quo when it comes to misinformation and extremist content?



Right now, we have platforms that are, by design, favoring extreme behavior. It’s not a new thing in the world of human behavior where lies and misinformation spread faster. There will still be some bad behavior [in DSNP], but it won’t amplify that behavior. The current internet is designed to amplify extreme behavior. You [can] have an internet where individuals are responsible for what they’re sharing, and feel ownership in the whole thing.



The MeWe migration involved a much smaller user base as would be involved in a TikTok migration. What challenges would TikTok’s scale present?



Like any technology scaling up, there will be things that have to be addressed from an engineering perspective. But it’s very straightforward stuff once you have your proof of concept. The fact that we’re sitting here, knowing that technology works, from the protocol level all the way up to the use case, that’s important. TikTok users can be part of this project. They can own a piece of the project, not just their content. It’s a fantastic opportunity that was very serendipitous.



We believe ByteDance is going to have to sell. We don’t want it to be shut down. And so let’s have an alternative that ByteDance can look and say, “Okay, these people aren’t taking the algorithm,” which they’ve made clear they’re not going to sell.



You’ve said before that you think TikTok has interesting tech beyond the algorithm. What exactly are you interested in?



The community of 170 million people is a perfect opportunity to catalyze this alternative internet. The brand is a big plus, and then you have all the tech short of the algorithm: The engine that powers it is valuable.



Wouldn’t DSNP migration impact TikTok’s business? If this went through tomorrow, from a business perspective would that pose challenges?



Yeah, so we’re in the process of building up a new business model. That’s why we brought in global securities and business and investment people to do exactly what you’re getting at. That’s a work in progress. Let’s zoom out for a second. Think about when Facebook, for instance, came on the scene: No business model and a piece of machinery—far less sophisticated than what we’re sitting here talking about today—and they very successfully took that idea to the marketplace.



We understand now the power of the internet in a very profound way—not in a way people understood it in 2004. There’s now a user base in place, much larger than Facebook at that time, and there’s a much better idea about how to actually engineer the internet than 20 years ago [with] “move fast and break things.” We moved fast, and we broke things. Let’s now fix what’s broken and unleash the power of this technology. I think that’s a far better story to tell to investors in 2024 then the Facebook story in 2004. They had no problem amassing capital; we’ll have no problem doing the same.



How do you define your role in a world where TikTok has migrated to DSNP?



Think about this as a broad, collective effort to reengineer how the internet works and use TikTok as a way to catalyze that. I personally am not looking to be in charge of a social media platform. I want to see an internet where the people using the Internet are engaged in solving these problems. Project Liberty is focused on the total picture: We have teams of people working on the different streams—one piece is the technology, another piece is the financial aspects that we just were talking about, another piece is getting civil society involved. Fixing the internet doesn’t solve every problem in the world, but we have a chance of having a technology that respects us and connects us in a way to solve big problems.



Most of your career has not been spent in tech. What’s been the biggest surprise as you’ve moved into this world of, basically, tech activism?



You’re right, but all my life has been spent building, and all my life has been spent on how infrastructure is put together. I see this as an infrastructure problem that needs to be fixed.



As far as the biggest surprise, what was very interesting to me was how we are living in two separate worlds: We’re living in the world of technologists, who are very focused on the techno-centric approach to things without understanding at all how the other aspects of societies work. And on the other hand are the social scientists who have a lack of understanding of how the technology works and how the technology was actually critical to get their policy objectives. There are two different worlds: the language of Silicon Valley versus the language of our policymaking in D.C. We need to bring the worlds together because the technology is no longer just a convenience; it’s actually integrated, and we’re dependent on it.