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.
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.
The issue at stake partly revolves around control of the so-called “social graph”, or users’ online data and digital footprint. In recent years, prominent voices such as McCourt and Haidt have lashed out at Big Tech’s control of the social graph, arguing this is being used to manipulate us all in unhealthy ways, via opaque algorithms, like the one inside TikTok.
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