McCourt, who says that he has no interest in becoming TikTok’s C.E.O., is unique among the group of potential buyers. For starters, he has been steadfastly public, voicing his desire to purchase the app in print and televised interviews, including on “Fox & Friends,” reportedly Trump’s favorite show. He is also the only potential buyer so far promising to serve the public’s interest—to address not only geopolitical concerns about the app but also the deleterious effects it has been shown to have on young users. But there are skeptics of the viability of a “people’s bid.” According to Adam Kovacevich, a Democratic tech lobbyist, “the hurdles to Project Liberty acquiring TikTok are vast.” Even if China allows a sale to go through, Project Liberty would be competing with a list of potential buyers that could include the likes of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Musk’s X. “I think it’s been kind of an opportunistic way to get visibility for their original mission of healthier social media,” Kovacevich said of Project Liberty. But, he added, “a nonprofit is going to get outbid.”
In November, just a couple of weeks after Trump’s victory, Project Liberty kicked off “The Summit on the Future of the Internet” at the McCourt School of Public Policy, which McCourt endowed at Georgetown University, his alma mater. The event was an example of McCourt’s billionaire connective power, gathering those with common interests who don’t often encounter one another face to face: four hundred attendees including politicians such as Amy Klobuchar, Ro Khanna, and Nancy Mace; technologists such as Bluesky’s C.E.O., Jay Graber, and the Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin; TikTok creators; think tankers; and grieving parents. Brandon Guffey, a Republican representative in the South Carolina legislature, whose teen-age son killed himself after falling prey to a sexual-extortion scheme on Instagram, was seated a few feet away from me during the opening remarks. McCourt roamed the stage in a dark knit crewneck and jeans, a tiny headset affixed to his ear. “You’re going to hear the word ‘data’ mentioned over and over and over again,” he said. “Every time you hear it, I’m asking you to think ‘personhood.’ Your data is you in the digital age. Don’t you want to own you?”
Broadly, Project Liberty is part of the movement toward a decentralized social Internet, where no single network controls users’ data and users can instead move their online identities and communities from one network to another without having to start from scratch. The idea is to create “interoperability,” which, in theory, would give users greater agency; if they don’t like the tone or content moderation on one site, they could move to another relatively seamlessly, without losing followers. The term “fediverse” is often applied to the corpus of sites, including Mastodon and Meta’s Threads, that use decentralized, interoperable systems. Bluesky, though not technically in the fediverse—it doesn’t use the ActivityPub protocol that fediverse sites do—is a spiritual cousin and can be easily connected to the fediverse with services such as Bridgy Fed. Project Liberty suggests that its own contribution to the decentralized Internet, the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, or D.S.N.P., could be used in ridesharing apps and on social media to enable creators “to manage their identity” and “avoid being deplatformed.”
Thus far, only the social-media site MeWe has fully adopted Project Liberty’s D.S.N.P., having migrated about 1.5 million users onto it; Bluesky currently has more than twenty-seven million users. “D.S.N.P. has a reputation as vaporware,” one technologist, who wanted to remain anonymous because they had received funding from Project Liberty, told me. The primary reason that McCourt wants to buy TikTok is to acquire its user base and port its members and their data over to Project Liberty’s decentralized protocol; he insists that he has no need for the app’s algorithm. “I have zero interest in maintaining a version of TikTok that’s just replicating the algorithm and scraping people’s data,” McCourt told me. His version of the app would help “stand up an alternative Internet, and then other people would have to move in this direction, because that’s what the marketplace wants.”
But the details of what a Project Liberty-owned version of TikTok might actually look like are scant. “The transition to this new infrastructure would be designed to minimize interruption for TikTokers,” a recent press release from the group promised, though the experience of the app would undoubtedly change without its algorithm. This, to some in the industry, seems like a backward approach to fixing the problems of social media. “McCourt seems to be saying, ‘Let’s use my money to acquire users,’ ” the technologist said. “Bluesky said, ‘We’ll just build the product, we’ll build the Twitter replacement, and when people need to leave, they will come here.’ ” (When I asked McCourt about this line of criticism, he said, “First of all, I haven’t parachuted in. I’ve been working on this for more than ten years. And, secondly, if they don’t agree or appreciate it, they just shouldn’t engage in it.”)
I asked Graber, the Bluesky C.E.O., about Project Liberty’s pitch. “I think everybody who’s in the interoperability conversation is, like, ‘Well, you should use my protocol, and then we’ll be interoperable with everyone,’ ” she said. “D.S.N.P. is very opinionated. It specifies a way that you do data, a way that you do identity. I have concerns about its scalability. But if you want to test it, go right ahead. We’re not a blocker to that.” Still, she shared some of the concerns about D.S.N.P.’s adoption strategy. “I tend to approach things from, like, ‘Where is adoption?’ and ‘What is a pragmatic approach to do things?’ ” Graber told me. “Trying to set a protocol standard for everybody before there’s wide adoption means that you might also get it wrong in terms of what you’re standardizing around.”
When it came to TikTok, Graber seemed most interested in the fate of the company’s algorithm. “A huge amount of the controversy is driven by how the algorithm works and the fact that there’s only one algorithm, and it can be quite addictive,” she said. Bluesky allows users to tailor their own social-media algorithms. Similarly, a divested, U.S.-owned TikTok might not have the same kind of novel, surprising content as the current version, but it could allow users to more freely choose what sort of content they wanted to see. People could opt in to a cute-animal algorithm, for instance, or one that pushed beauty tips. “I think opening up algorithms to a marketplace of algorithms is a really healthy intervention to make,” Graber told me. “Just make it really easy for most users, give them the ability to choose, and then make sure that the data is open.”
Project Liberty was using the summit to launch another tech initiative, what the group calls Log in with Liberty, a way to browse the Internet as a data-autonomous individual, without having to turn over personal information. On the second day of the conference, Braxton Woodham, a co-creator of Project Liberty’s D.S.N.P. protocol, played me a brief video about how the new service would work. “Imagine a singular online identity that belongs to you, one where you control how other companies interact with your data, where you own your connections and content across applications,” a voice-over intoned, showing a woman posting about her trip to Miami on two separate social-media platforms. “Join us on the People’s Internet and log in with Liberty.” The video ended, but I remained unclear about what “logging in with Liberty” entailed. Woodham, a rocket scientist by training, who was formerly the chief technology officer at Fandango, recalled how Facebook and Google have tried to get users to log in to various sites using proprietary accounts. Project Liberty wanted to provide a non-corporate alternative to this sort of log-in. An acquisition of TikTok would give the group millions of users to offer this option to.
Log in with Liberty, Woodham went on, may ultimately resemble something like the Energy Star logo on household appliances, which indicates energy-efficient products. Most consumers don’t know what the Energy Star label means, exactly, but they like their appliances to have it. “We look at the consumer-level change more that way,” Woodham said. “It’s not a revelatory feature.” It was more about gradually changing expectations.
At the Cape, McCourt was eager to show me the full extent of his property. We hopped onto a golf cart and drove down from the main house, across the street, and into a wooded preserve filled with tall pines, where McCourt, a self-professed “stone head”—as in, he loves granite—has erected a series of stone installations of his own design. One piece, a sphere that appears to float when summer ferns grow around it, was completed in 2019, shortly after the death of his mother, at the age of a hundred and two, and the birth of one of his sons. The period seemed to crack something open in McCourt. It was the same year he started planning Project Liberty. “I don’t know whether it was having the confidence or the maturity, or the ability to express myself in a way that spoke to the journey that I felt that I was on,” he told me.
We drove to a small hill nestled in the woods. McCourt stopped by a stone wall with a poem that he’d written etched on it. “It’s about seeing what you didn’t see before,” he said. “It was there, but you didn’t see it.” People always seem to be in motion, he said, restless but perhaps not “listening and observing and really absorbing.” We walked down a small slope, past a dry-stacked wall, and into a Zen garden with a lily pond. He directed me to pose for a picture under the willow arch where, he told me, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web—and a supporter of Project Liberty—had also stood.
As we walked out of the gardens, I asked McCourt whether Project Liberty was, in part, an act of penance for previous missteps. Not penance, he told me. But he does think of his work through the lens of magnanimity, the concept that Thomas Aquinas and later Ignatius of Loyola popularized. “It’s the idea of doing whatever is necessary,” he said. “So, if it’s necessary to be subordinate and wash the feet of another, that’s what you do. If it’s necessary to do something very bold, that’s what you do.” I found myself imagining what Aquinas might have thought of a TikTok bid.
At the Project Liberty summit, McCourt had seemed concerned that his broader Internet project was being subsumed by buzz around the app’s sale. “The way the media works is it focusses on the issue of the moment,” he said. “And that’s both good and bad.” The speculation surrounding TikTok, he acknowledged, had “elevated” the profile of Project Liberty. But on the Cape he seemed as uncertain as everyone else about what might happen to the app after January 19th. “I do think it’s going to be sold,” McCourt said, as he drove the golf cart through an immense expanse of lawn. “Now play that out—is it an insider-type deal and nothing changes except the ownership? Or is it, you know, not an insider deal and everything changes, because it’s an opportunity to start fixing the Internet, not just fix TikTok?”
McCourt’s political donations have largely been to Democratic candidates, but he has remained optimistic about the incoming Administration. Some of Project Liberty’s tech projects rely on blockchain to allow users to move and control their online identity from site to site. During the campaign, Trump promised to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.” “I think with Trump, projects like this have just gotten a huge, huge boost because of his belief in blockchain,” McCourt told me. “That’s way bigger for this project than TikTok.” (Later, he told me that the Musk rumor was noteworthy because it was the first public indication that the Chinese might be open to a sale.)
