Back in 2020, when then US president Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok because of alleged Chinese influence, Microsoft tried and failed to buy the app’s US operation — a move that chief executive Satya Nadella later dubbed “the strangest thing” he had ever done.
Now events are becoming even stranger. Last month President Joe Biden signed a bill demanding that ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based owner, sell its US operations by January 2025, or face a ban. ByteDance is now fighting this through the US courts. Meanwhile, Trump himself has apparently flipped and seems to oppose a ban, probably because Jeff Yass, one of several major US ByteDance investors, is also a big Trump supporter.
But stranger still, some of Trump’s key allies, such as Robert Lighthizer, hate China’s alleged influence over TikTok, while Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s former Treasury secretary, seems eager to buy it.
And this week Frank McCourt, the real estate mogul and fierce critic of Big Tech, launched a putative “people’s bid”, via Guggenheim investment bank. This is backed by Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web, and Jonathan Haidt, the influential social psychologist whose new book, The Anxious Generation, decries social media.
In reality, this public gambit seems quixotic, if not publicity-grabbing. McCourt claims he has an edge in any contest, since he does not want to buy the recommendation algorithm. This is considered to be TikTok’s secret sauce, which many in Washington allege is tightly controlled by Beijing and thus key to US national security concerns. “We will likely be the only bidder who will not be interested in the algorithm,” McCourt tells me, insisting that removing it is the only way to build a healthier platform.