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Billionaire tech critic Frank McCourt is mounting a “people’s bid” to buy TikTok from its owner ByteDance, in an effort to save the app from being banned in the United States. The reportedly terrible former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team now runs McCourt Global and Project Liberty, which among other things advocates for open-sourced decentralized networking protocols, a vision of social media networks which operate separately from corporations. According to Semafor, McCourt, with an assist from Guggenheim investments, is assembling a group of investors to go up against the corporate giants who will inevitably vie for the company. “TikTok presents the best and worst of the internet. It connects 170 million people and allows them to be creative and build things and enjoy things and do things,” he said. “On the other hand, they don’t get to really share in the value that’s created, and their data is scraped and stolen and shipped to China.”
