Project Liberty founder Frank McCourt believes their bid for TikTok centers on a human rights issue, not a tech issue
On Friday morning, the Trump administration extended the deadline for China-based ByteDance to sell TikTok. For another 75 days, the video-sharing app will remain as is for its 170 million United States users — unless the extension is challenged.
President Donald Trump announced the extension on social media, reasoning that more time is needed to make a deal between Bytedance and an American buyer. “My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” he said. “We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’ We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal.”
This is the second time Trump has postponed the app’s sale or ban in the U.S. Last year, Congress signed a law that said ByteDance has to sell TikTok, or the app would be shut down. The Supreme Court upheld the law in December, making Trump’s executive orders to keep TikTok running legally questionable.
Several American investors and businesses have put forward bids to buy the app, including the billionaire former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, founder of the nonprofit Project Liberty.
In a sit-down interview on Friday with Deseret News, McCourt and Tomicah Tillemann, Project Liberty’s president, said despite the news, they continue to believe their bid is the only one that will comply with the law.
McCourt was in Salt Lake City to attend the signing of several bills that aim to protect children online, including one that gives users the right to own, control and manage their data, ensuring that they can permanently delete their own information. This right, which McCourt called a “human right,” is the focus of Project Liberty, a nonprofit that aims to create a new information superhighway that is “healthier” and “safer” for its users.
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