The battle for the future of TikTok’s US operations has been a wild ride. In January, the Supreme Court upheld the ban on the app due to ByteDance’s failure to sell it to a US-based company. However, President Trump granted extensions to find a buyer, citing the need to navigate fallout from tariffs on China.
Now, the new deadline for ByteDance to sell to a US company is June 19. Several companies have made offers and are negotiating with the White House, with Oracle as a front-runner. However, a consortium led by Frank McCourt aims to radically change how the app operates, with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian joining the effort.
Project Liberty, led by Tomicah Tillemann, envisions a decentralized network for TikTok, giving users more control over their data and content. This shift towards democratizing control of tech systems aims to address concerns about centralized social networks.
Project Liberty hopes to use TikTok as an example of a better model for the future of the internet, offering increased data privacy for users through user-led data controls. Their vision is to create a platform that not only succeeds commercially but also serves as critical digital infrastructure, addressing national security and data security concerns in the digital world. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
“We believe, as a foundational matter of how the web works, that people should have much greater agency over how their information is leveraged online — that is hardwired into the infrastructure that we’ve developed,” said Tillemann.
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Similarly to how HTTP revolutionized device connection, he said DSNP can be the foundation for that agency. This approach undergirds Frequency, a new piece of infrastructure that lets users move personal data across platforms.
“All of our work is kind of grounded in the idea that we can’t just have nice theoretical solutions. We have to make this stuff super useful and super easy for people to benefit from,” he said.
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Tillemann, who has worked for politicians including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, and has significant experience in civic tech, said current policy efforts have left much to be desired.
“In almost every case, policymaking fails to achieve its ultimate objectives because it is dependent solely on legal code, rather than being augmented by technical code,” he said.
“What we’re trying to do is put forward technology that can advance the policy objectives. We think when you can align your legal code and your technical code, that’s when you’re going to get the outcomes that people are looking for that have been pretty elusive to date.”
Intentional content over addictive feeds
Decentralization allows specific communities to create feeds around their shared interests. Theoretically, these communities would reward content that users engage with, instead of simply the most attention-grabbing or addictive material.
“Our vision is to pivot from the current attention economy that drives not only TikTok, but many of the other big platforms on the web, and move toward an intention economy where people are able to proactively identify the types of experiences, content, goods, and services with which they would like to interact,” said Tillemann. “Then they can curate their own feeds on that basis to develop something that’s going to work well for them.”
Tillemann noted that this shift tends to result in a healthier online experience and higher engagement, which drives up ad value: “If you can get people to express their intent and use that as the basis for selling advertising, your advertising becomes a lot more valuable.”
The People’s Bid doesn’t include buying TikTok’s algorithm, which is another deviation from other buyers’ approaches. Oracle’s offer proposes that US user data is stored on Oracle-run servers while ByteDance continues to be somewhat involved in TikTok’s operations. Perplexity’s proposal is unique because, unlike Oracle, the AI company aims “to rebuild the TikTok algorithm without creating a monopoly.”
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Because content and user engagement would be determined in many ways by individual communities on a decentralized TikTok, it’s hard to say what automated content discovery, if there is any, would look like on this new version of the platform. But Tillemann suggested what could be possible once users get comfortable with the shifts.
“Longer term, we’re really intrigued by the work that’s happened at BlueSky and elsewhere, where you have large libraries of open-source algorithms, and people are able to assemble those almost like Legos and come up with their own personal algorithm,” said Tillemann.
“Eventually, you’ll have a personal AI agent that works for you, that helps you curate and design the algorithm in exactly the way you want it curated and designed.”
He also said that, if the sale goes through, decentralization would take place slowly in batches to maintain the user experience. He added that Project Liberty will provide “solutions for content feeds, if that’s necessary as a stopgap,” during the technical transition.
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But with all these changes, will TikTok still be TikTok?
“It’s something that obviously will be sorted out in the course of an agreement, but we’d like to keep the brand TikTok,” said Tillemann. “I don’t want to assume that that’s inevitably what’s going to happen. But we think it’s a good, strong brand. A lot of people know it and love it.”
Content moderation and fact-checking
Social media is a notorious breeding ground for misinformation, especially when combined with light-speed algorithmic content delivery and increasingly convincing synthetic media powered by AI. As evidenced by X and Meta moving to a Community Notes moderation structure, fact-checking at the platform level is falling out of fashion during Trump’s administration. So, how does content moderation work in a decentralized environment?
Project Liberty Institute, the nonprofit arm of the organization, is a founding partner of Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST), a new protocol launched at the recent Paris AI Action Summit. According to its website, the team of technicians and experts behind ROOST “develops, maintains, and distributes open-source building blocks to safeguard global users and communities,” which include content safeguards.
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Tillemann cited ROOST as a first step for Project Liberty’s fact-checking approach. “I think there’s an opportunity to tackle that set of issues very transparently […] in a way where I’m not making the decisions, Frank McCourt isn’t making the decisions — you shouldn’t trust us to do your content moderation,” he said, reaffirming that the organization doesn’t necessarily want a top-down approach. “We have, hopefully, a broader community of stakeholders that are weighing in on those issues.”
He continued: “Our hope and expectation is that as those open-source solutions get better and better, it won’t just be one platform like TikTok that will benefit from them.”
Greater control for creators
Tillemann said the future of the creator economy is a “huge focus” for Project Liberty. In preparation for its bid, he and McCourt hosted a dinner for 20 TikTok creators. They expressed their frustration at the opaque nature of the platform’s algorithm and a desire to understand how to optimize their content. Mereka memahami bahwa mereka bukan penerima utama dari nilai ekonomi yang dihasilkan di platform,” kata Tillemann. “Salah satu alasan mengapa kami menyebut upaya kami sebagai Tawaran Rakyat adalah karena kami ingin para pencipta dan orang lain di platform tersebut ikut berbagi dalam ekonomi.” Juga: Bagaimana aplikasi desktop yang ditingkatkan TikTok menantang YouTube dalam streaming game – dan lainnya. Dia mengatakan Project Liberty bertujuan untuk menjaga aliran pendapatan yang ada aktif bersamaan dengan “mekanisme baru untuk memberikan kepemilikan langsung yang lebih besar kepada para pencipta di platform.” “Itu jujur sulit dilakukan mengingat beberapa keterbatasan regulasi yang ada,” katanya. “Kami sangat berkomitmen dalam jangka panjang untuk melakukan hal itu dengan benar dan berpikir secara kreatif tentang bagaimana Anda bisa mengembangkan beberapa keterbatasan hukum sekuritas yang ada dengan cara yang akan membuatnya memungkinkan bagi ekonomi yang lebih inklusif sebagai bagian dari cara platform beroperasi.” Apa yang akan terjadi selanjutnya? Terlepas dari apakah penjualan berlangsung, Tillemann mengatakan Project Liberty berkomitmen untuk masa depan terdesentralisasi untuk media sosial. “Akuisisi TikTok [adalah] cara untuk mempercepat waktu,” katanya. “Kami cukup yakin bahwa kami akan sampai di sana dengan satu cara atau lainnya, terlepas dari apakah kami mendapatkan TikTok. Kami sedang dalam diskusi dengan banyak platform luar biasa saat ini, dan kami sangat antusias tentang TikTok, tetapi itu tentu bukan satu-satunya platform yang kami kerjakan atau menuju implementasi perubahan ini.” Dia mengatakan mitra potensial lainnya dapat membantu memupuk ekosistem yang lebih besar dari media sosial yang lebih baik, berbasis nilai. Tetapi dia menambahkan bahwa TikTok memiliki kekuatan yang unik di area ini: “Jika Anda bisa membuat mesin budaya internet merangkul prinsip-prinsip ini, banyak hal menjadi cukup mudah dengan cepat.” Dapatkan cerita teratas pagi ini di kotak masuk Anda setiap hari dengan newsletter Kami Hari Ini.