There’s a new TikTok bid brewing—and this one aims to rewrite how social media works

There’s no shortage of people who want to buy TikTok from China-based parent company ByteDance, the target of a new U.S. law that says it has to sell the social network within a year or see it effectively banned in the country. But so far, their expressions of interest have mostly seemed a little pointless.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick may be preparing their bids, but Beijing has repeatedly insisted that it doesn't want ByteDance to sell the service. And if a sale does happen, it’s very likely that the buyer wouldn’t be getting TikTok’s core recommendation algorithm, the sale of which China can block under its export control rules. Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary highlighted this fact in March, when announcing his own imminent bid at a 90% discount to TikTok’s valuation at its last funding round—the buyer would have to “re-emulate” TikTok’s algorithm, he said.

But what if the buyer wants to use TikTok as a host for an idealistic rewrite of the social networking playbook, rather than trying to merely recreate its existing technology? That’s the tantalizing prospect being touted by former L.A. Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, who this morning announced his entry into the TikTok fray.

A few years ago, the Bostonian real-estate billionaire founded an organization called Project Liberty, dedicated to promoting an alternative to what he sees as the divisive, privacy-trampling, and exploitative ways of Big Tech. Much like web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, McCourt wants to bring back some of the flavor of the pre-Facebook web, where decentralization ruled and people could participate in online life without constant surveillance and manipulation. And Project Liberty isn’t just about advocacy—it’s also been developing a new protocol called the Decentralized Social Network Protocol (DSNP), which uses blockchain infrastructure.

So far, DSNP’s most notable adopter has been the privacy-first social network MeWe, which claims to have over 20 million users, and in which McCourt is an investor. But TikTok has over 170 million users in the U.S. alone.

“We see this potential acquisition as an incredible opportunity to catalyze an alternative to the current tech model that has colonized the internet,” McCourt said in a statement. “We believe we can preserve—and enhance—the TikTok experience by giving individuals and creators on the platform the value and control they deserve regarding who has access to their data and how it is used.”

Berners-Lee, who these days leads a decentralized-data project called Solid, is endorsing McCourt’s bid. “The web I invented was to provide power and value to individuals, which they do not have at the moment,” he said in the statement. “Users should have an ability to control their own data, to share it with other people and organizations as they choose. A TikTok utilizing open internet protocols, such as Solid, will embrace the critical values of privacy, data sovereignty, and user mental health.”

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a prominent promoter of the idea that technology has caused an epidemic of mental illness among young people, is also on board, arguing that McCourt wants to evolve social media “in ways that are far less harmful to children and teens than it is today.” On the money side, the investment bank Guggenheim Securities is already involved, and McCourt is looking to build his bidding consortium.

Of course, the notion of decentralized social media is no longer as outlandish as it once was, with decentralized Bluesky and Mastodon picking up many of the former Twitter users who have fled X, and with even Meta’s Threads (another X rival) gradually adding support for the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon uses to interoperate with other platforms. But if a network of TikTok’s size and cultural relevance were to be revamped to go against the Big Tech grain—explicitly rejecting the exploitative ways that Meta has come to embody—that would truly be something else.

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David Meyer

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com