American billionaire Frank McCourt said his nonprofit initiative Project Liberty would create a more secure TikTok if it were to purchase the social media platform.
“We started a project five years ago by the name of Project Liberty to redesign and reimagine how the internet works so that rather than have individuals surveilled and have their data scraped and stolen from them and be microprofiled and be taken advantage of, why not have an internet where individuals own and control their data,” he told “NewsNation Now.”
McCourt’s Project Liberty advocacy group submitted a bid to buy the U.S. assets of TikTok in early January with plans to run the app on the group’s technology, which aims to let users choose how their data will be used and shared. TikTok has sued to block the U.S. ban, but the Supreme Court upheld it in a decision last month.
The prospect of gaining ownership over one of the world’s most recognized video-sharing platforms, or at least its U.S. audience, has drawn an increasingly long list of people and entities ranging from the world of finance, technology and entertainment.
Many in Trump’s orbit, or with close ties to the president, have been linked with TikTok ever since the U.S. ban became a possibility under the administration of former President Joe Biden.
“We’re all lined up to buy. We have the tech, we have the capital, and we’re ready to go,” said McCourt. “But we have to wait and see what ByteDance actually does. And ByteDance, in turn, has a golden shareholder, the Chinese Communist Party.”
“And I think everybody is waiting to see what China and ByteDance are going to do as the clock ticks,” he added.
The billionaire emphasized that “whoever” buys TikTok needs to meet the “national security criteria laid out in both the legislation and upheld nine-zero by the Supreme Court.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
