Project Liberty boss leads push to buy TikTok's US operations

Entrepreneur and former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt said yesterday his organization, Project Liberty, is forming a consortium to buy social media platform TikTok in the United States.

A law signed by President Joe Biden on April 24 gives the social media platform's owner, ByteDance, until January 19 to sell TikTok or face a ban.

The bill was passed by US lawmakers over worries that China could access Americans' data or surveil them through the app.

The White House has said it wants to see Chinese-based ownership ended on national security grounds but not a ban on TikTok.

Project Liberty, working with Guggenheim Securities, law firm Kirkland & Ellis, technologies, academics and others, proposed to migrate the platform to a digital open-source protocol.

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and David Clark, senior MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research scientist, are said to be among the bid's supporters.

Project Liberty launched the open-source Decentralized Social Networking Protocol in 2021, establishing a shared social graph that is not dependent on a specific application or a centralized platform.