TikTok bidder Frank McCourt backs US surgeon general’s call for health warnings on social media, amid ‘epidemic’

Frank McCourt, the billionaire businessman bidding to buy TikTok, has strongly backed calls for social media to carry health warnings like tobacco products.

The McCourt Global founder (pictured above) agreed with the US surgeon general, who argued on Monday that people who visit social platforms should be shown a message warning that they are “associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents”.

In a newspaper article, US Surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy had referred to social media as “an important contributor” to the current mental health crisis among young adults. However, speaking at Collision in Toronto, Frank went further, calling it “an epidemic”.

Asked if he agreed that social platforms should have a warning on them because of their detrimental impact on mental health, the man aiming to own TikTok in the USA twice replied “yes”, before adding: “Our responsibility as adults here is obviously to protect the next generation”.

Frank also referred to US campaigns for regulation by parents who lost children to the negative effects of social media, saying: “I think exactly the same thing is going to happen here [in Canada], where parents are seeing the epidemic.”

“Our surgeon general is bringing attention to it. Many other people are doing the same. I think this movement is happening as we sit here.” 

“I would invite all of you to join it because this is what it’s going to take to change things and to create this alternative. We need to fix the tech,” said Frank.

“The internet is no longer an optional thing in our lives. It’s not something that we can take or leave. It is integral. It’s integrated into our lives. We’re dependent on it.”

Frank also spent time denouncing the TikTok algorithm and business model, while underlining an interest in acquiring the platform’s userbase.

“We don’t believe in that model. We don’t believe in the top-down model, and we don’t believe that just replacing China’s control and money with some other sovereign’s control and money solves anything,” stated the founder.

When asked if he thought he would be buying TikTok’s powerful algorithm upon the potential purchase of the company, Frank replied: “We don’t want it and we don’t need it, which is why I think our people’s bid has a great chance of succeeding”.

Why the interest in buying TikTok if not for ByteDance’s powerful algorithm? This is related to the surgeon general’s call to put health warnings on social media. Frank believes current models are exploitative and damaging, taking control of personal data from the user.

“We believe in a different model, where we move people over to this new protocol. It’s called DSNP (an open protocol known as Decentralized Social Networking Protocol).”

“The value in TikTok,” said Frank, “is the 170 million users […] Most are very tech savvy. Big data/small algorithm beats big algorithm/small data any day,” added the founder.

“There are many people already approaching us from different parts of the world, not just the US, wanting to help rewrite algorithms, but we believe that algorithms are not a bad thing if people are permitting their data to be used.”

“Let’s permit the use of our data so that we have agency again, as well as economic value. Choice, a voice and a stake, that’s the internet that I think we should have. And then we’ll build algorithms, we’ll use the tech.”

“The internet is awesome, it’s just not being used in an awesome way right now,” said Frank.

When the McCourt Global founder was asked if purchasing TikTok might be a profitable venture, Frank admitted: “I do. I believe when you empower people, what happens with their imagination is explosive”.

“I just wrote a book on this. It’s called Our Biggest Fight. I used the American project and Thomas Paine as the inspiration and as the framing mechanism.”

When discussing Project Liberty (a non-profit initiative that released DSNP as a public utility working towards a more open web), Frank said: “I’ve committed a half a billion dollars to it, which is a sizable amount of money, but it’s really nothing compared to what’s required to change this. We need to create the new economic models that are going to make this work.” 

Frank went on to speak about the current state of big tech, where platforms mine user data, technology is proprietary, and opaque algorithms dictate user behaviour.

“Let’s give the people that create the value, the value in this future internet. It’s your data. That’s the value proposition and it’s time that we reset how it works, because as I said, it’s all technology that went off in a [certain] direction, but it’s just technology. We can change it. It doesn’t have to be this way. And let’s bring solutions forward.”

Frank’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on data privacy at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:

• Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
• Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
• Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
• Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
• Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
• Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
• Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
• Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
• Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
• Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

About Web Summit: 

Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

This year alone, Web Summit has hosted sold-out events in Qatar, which welcomed more than 15,000 attendees, and in Rio, where more than 34,000 people took part. Our events have been supported by partners including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. 

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Useful links

• Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
• Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
• Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
• About Web Summit: about.websummit.com