TikTok will be a little bit more like Pinterest if the billionaire Frank McCourt succeeds in acquiring it. Which is kind of like saying that professional wrestling will become more like croquet.
This week I interviewed McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, about his interest in the American operation of TikTok, which the U.S. government is trying to pry away from its current owner, ByteDance. (ByteDance was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, although it notes that most of its owners aren’t Chinese.)
What makes TikTok so addictive is that its algorithm, even more than those of other social media apps, is fine-tuned to give you more and more of the content that you can’t tear yourself away from. If the algorithm sees that you linger over videos of muscle-building, it will feed you muscle-building videos all day long. Its goal is to retain your eyeballs for as long as possible.
Pinterest doesn’t tease the id so much. When Bill Ready became the company’s chief executive in 2022, he ordered its algorithm changed so that people would get content that they deliberately requested. Home decorating tips, for example. Probably not gory car crashes, which people typically don’t ask for, but will stare at despite their better judgment.
“When I came in, we were cloning TikTok, like everybody else,” he told me. The goal for users was “maximizing view time. Now we’re trying to help them have a life in the real world that they love.”
Pinterest appeals to customers’ “upstairs brains,” not their “downstairs brains,” Ready added.
I would be happy for TikTok to become less addictive, and so would many of its target customers. Forty-seven percent of Gen Z respondents to a Harris Poll agreed with the statement “I wish TikTok had never been invented,” as Will Johnson, the chief executive of the Harris Poll, and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a Times Opinion guest essay last week. (Fully 50 percent said the same of X/Twitter.)
McCourt invited Ready and Haidt to a lunch for journalists this week. The title of Haidt’s latest book leaves no doubt where he stands: “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”
Several things would have to happen before McCourt could carry out his plan for TikTok. First, TikTok would have to be for sale. The company is trying to get the courts to overturn the law that Congress passed in April, called the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary-Controlled Applications Act, which requires ByteDance to shut down or sell the U.S. operation of TikTok by Jan. 19.
Even if ByteDance loses the case, it may choose to shut down the operation rather than sell it. And even if it does sell, McCourt may not win the bidding. Project Liberty, which he founded, would have to put together a group of investors that could swing a purchase price of billions of dollars. Steven Mnuchin, who was President Trump’s Treasury secretary, is a possible rival bidder. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bobby Kotick, the former chief executive of Activision, the videogame publisher, has also floated the idea of forming a buyers’ group. And there could be others.
When I interviewed McCourt this week, I asked him what would happen if he clears all those hurdles and TikTok becomes his. For one thing, he wouldn’t change the name. For another, he doesn’t even want the algorithm, or “recommendation engine,” which the Chinese government has indicated it would not allow a foreign entity to acquire.
Instead, McCourt would rebuild TikTok on top of the same network protocol that now underlies MeWe, a much smaller social network that says it is “engineered to respect personal privacy and avoid algorithmic manipulation — allowing for authentic relationships and community to thrive.” Adding the 170 million monthly U.S. users of TikTok would turn the protocol from an interesting experiment to a major player.
Yet his goal is to keep TikTok’s look and feel, he told me. That seems to contradict, at least a little bit, his desire to give customers a chance to view what they want, instead of being led to whatever TikTok dishes up. (While TikTok mainly goes by people’s past viewing habits, it also allows its users to effectively dislike posts so they see fewer like them.) Asking users what they want to see would be a big change in the look and feel, it seems to me.
McCourt also said that customers would be better able to choose what information about themselves they would be willing to share. I think that’s a good goal, but in practice I imagine that customers would divulge quite a lot about themselves if that’s the price for getting the content they want.
Those caveats aside, I think McCourt has a good vision for what TikTok could become. Maybe someday Gen Z will stop wishing that it never existed.
The Readers Write
I was a year ahead of Dennis Carlton in the economics Ph.D. program at M.I.T. I have since worked as an economic consultant at various consulting firms, including the Brattle Group, which I founded with several colleagues. I have testified as an economic expert many times.
You basically said that he made $100 million as an economic expert because he wins cases. That characterization is seriously misleading because it ignores the critical difference between attorneys and experts. Attorneys win or lose cases — not experts. The attorney is an advocate whose obligation is to do everything possible to prevail for the client. The sole role of the expert is to assist the finder of fact — be it a judge, a mediator, an arbitrator or a jury. When an expert crosses the line into becoming an advocate, all their credibility is lost.
Kenneth Wise
Alamo, Calif.
Your snide treatment of David Evans and Competition Policy International merits a public apology. I have been associated with C.P.I. since its founding (and with David Evans for longer than that), and I believe C.P.I. is exactly what it claims to be and is broadly respected within the global antitrust community.
Richard Schmalensee
Boston
I have over 40 years of experience as an economic expert. In my experience, it’s more that money finds the voices that are saying what they want to hear, not that academic voices speak what they know will be rewarded in money or fame. No doubt there are those in the academic community who are corruptible, but a lot of academic pride (hubris?) is held in being right, no matter what others might think.
Andrew Novakovic
Milwaukee
Please, if you report about energy and our fancy cellphones and which country is the king of battery power, please mention the child slaves in the Democratic Republic of Congo mining cobalt who make sending selfies possible.
Ginger Sinsabaugh
Lima, Peru
Quote of the Day
“There are real problems with the current trading system, but the counterfactual scenario is almost certainly worse: It is difficult to believe that international security would be better served if leading powers had no economic stake in one another’s stability and prosperity and no shared institutions in which to engage.”
— Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, “Why the World Still Needs Trade: The Case for Reimagining — Not Abandoning — Globalization,” Foreign Affairs (June 8, 2023)
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