‘It will be a different place’: The billionaire-backed push to buy TikTok is gaining steam (2024)

A billionaire-backed “people’s bid” to buy TikTok in the US is gathering steam, in a move that could radically reshape the controversial social media app and its mysterious algorithms.

Project Liberty is a consortium led by billionaire entrepreneur and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, Frank McCourt, who has brought in investment banks, academics, technologists and citizens in a bid to migrate the TikTok platform to open-source protocols, and “safeguard the health and well-being of our children, families, democracy and society.”

Aiding those efforts is Audrey Tang, a Taiwanese politician and programmer who until recently served as Taiwan’s first-ever minister of digital affairs, as well as the first trans and non-binary Taiwanese government minister.

Tang, who has been appointed a Senior Fellow with the Project Liberty Institute, is visiting Australia and will address the National Press Club in Canberra on Thursday. They have been brought to Australia by Per Capita’s The Centre of the Public Square, an initiative to build platforms for better public discussions.

“I’m helping the team that is now attempting to purchase TikTok US and turn it into a co-operative, basically, that can be governed democratically, so that everybody has a choice of recommendation, algorithm and also a voice,” Tang said in an interview.

A law signed by US President Joe Biden has given TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance until January 19 next year to sell TikTok or face a ban in the United States, over fears China could access Americans’ data or surveil them through the app.

TikTok Australia was contacted for comment. ByteDance said in April that “it doesn’t have any plans to sell TikTok”.

TikTok shareholders stand to lose a lot of value if the app gets banned in the US, Tang said, opening an opportunity for the likes of Project Liberty to make a competitive offer.

“I imagine that it will result in much more free choice between the recommendation algorithms,” Tang said of what TikTok could hypothetically look like under Project Liberty’s stewardship.

“Like, I don’t really enjoy very short videos, I enjoy longer form. I enjoy interactions, I enjoy journalistic content with investigations and so on. And imagine if I can just tell my “for you” feed that I prefer these things, and then it just curates based on my interests, instead of the advertisem*nts or whatever that remote controls TikTok. It will be a very different place.

‘If you trust the people, sometimes people trust back.’

Taiwanese politician Audrey Tang

“I think it’s good for creators as well [who] want real engagements with people, without the intermediary that forces you into particular forms of media.”

TikTok’s algorithms largely remain a mysterious black box, though the company has previously publicly shared the broad outlines of its recommendation system, saying it takes into account factors including likes and comments as well as video information like captions, sounds and hashtags.

Tang is taking back control of their own internet experience using a browser extension called News Feed Eradicator, which removes algorithmic content from Facebook, Instagram and X and instead replaces it with a random inspirational quote.

“I think by far it’s the largest source of people’s unhappiness,” they said of social media algorithms.

“It often sorts by so-called engagement, curiosity, constructiveness and so on. I still use the internet the way it was meant to be used before this algorithmic ‘for you’ feed thing. I have an intention, I want to seek out some people, explore a topic or start a conversation, and I can do all that without getting sidetracked or distracted by an algorithmic feed.”

Modern technologies like social media are often criticised for dividing people and fuelling distrust between society and the government, but for Tang, the reverse is true: tech can and should be used to help build trust. It’s the focus of their new book, Plurality, which emphasises the potential of technology to promote collaboration in democratic processes.

Tang was a student protestor before becoming a government minister in 2016, and has since used their political career to drive digitally-led reforms across the Taiwanese government, including making government websites more accessible and allowing citizens to launch digital petitions. By 2022, Taiwan’s 15-year-olds ranked first globally for feelings of civic engagement.

Loading

Those are concepts Tang said can be applied in Australia and elsewhere.

“Democracy itself is a social technology. We can make it better if we get more people to focus on making it much more responsive, as to say lower latency, and much more informative in a sense of higher bandwidth,” they said. “If you think of democracy, like voting, every four years is very high latency.

“There are all these different ways that you can improve democracy as a social technology, and it doesn’t need to threaten the existing representatives. It can be a very useful assistive augmenting tool to get people together.

“And Taiwan can help. We have a lot of experience giving trust from the government to the citizens, and nowadays in terms of rural, urban or ethnic or religious polarisation, Taiwan is the least in the world.

“If you trust the people, sometimes people trust back.”

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.