Frank McCourt Still Pursuing TikTok Option Despite White House deal
WASHINGTON D.C. – billionaire Frank McCourt is continuing to develop a privacy-focused alternative to TikTok, even as the White House moves forward with a deal to allow ByteDance to retain ownership of the popular social media platform. McCourt, through his Project Liberty initiative, previously submitted a $20 billion bid for TikTok’s U.S. operations – valuing the company $6 billion more than the White house’s proposed $14 billion deal – but without its core algorithm.
The Project Liberty offer, dubbed the “People’s bid for TikTok,” aimed to restructure the platform to collect less user data and implement a new algorithm developed by the Project Liberty nonprofit. This contrasts with the White House’s plan, which lacked details regarding ownership and offered a valuation that confused investors given ByteDance’s estimated $330 billion overall value.
While not actively opposing the current White House agreement, mccourt stated it is “too early to say” what further action Project Liberty will take. A key concern remains the privacy protections that will be implemented. ”Big tech platforms are scraping and accumulating our data, hyper, micro-profiling us, and now they’re not just selling us ads, but they’re manipulating us,” McCourt said. ”Our data is our personhood in a digital age … We should share what we want to share about ourselves.”
Should acquiring TikTok prove unachievable, McCourt intends to repurpose Project Liberty’s technology into an AI agent designed to give users control over their personal information as they navigate the web and interact with AI systems.
Notably, despite claims by former President trump that Chinese President Xi Jinping approved the deal, no ByteDance representatives were present at the executive order signing, and the chinese government has remained publicly silent on the matter. McCourt, along with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and others, initially sought to purchase TikTok before Trump’s involvement, proposing a sale excluding the algorithm – a condition China had previously resisted.