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Simply 10 days earlier than the U.S. ban on TikTok goes into impact, businessman Frank McCourt’s web advocacy nonprofit Project Liberty introduced Thursday it has submitted a proposal to purchase the social media website from Chinese language know-how firm ByteDance.
Undertaking Liberty and its companions, often known as “The Folks’s Bid for TikTok,” would restructure the app to exist on an American-owned platform and prioritize customers’ digital security, the venture stated in a statement.
“We have put ahead a proposal to ByteDance to comprehend Undertaking Liberty’s imaginative and prescient for a reimagined TikTok – one constructed on an American-made tech stack that places folks first,” McCourt, Undertaking Liberty’s founder, stated within the assertion. “By maintaining the platform alive with out counting on the present TikTok algorithm and avoiding a ban, tens of millions of Individuals can proceed to benefit from the platform.”
A Undertaking Liberty spokesperson stated the nonprofit was not disclosing the monetary phrases of the provide however confirmed that ByteDance has obtained the proposal.
CNBC has reached out to TikTok for remark.
The Supreme Court docket will hear oral arguments on the ban, which was signed into regulation by President Joe Biden final April, on Friday. ByteDance has repeatedly refused to promote TikTok and appealed the laws on First Modification grounds.
The case has labored its manner by the judicial system. Most lately, the U.S. Court docket of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dominated in favor of the regulation on Dec. 6, writing that the federal government’s nationwide safety justifications for the ban had been sufficiently compelling.
In a Dec. 9 court filing, TikTok stated that the ban would value U.S. small companies and social media creators $1.3 billion in income and earnings in only one month, and that greater than 7 million U.S. customers do enterprise on TikTok.
The ban, often known as the Defending Individuals from International Adversary Managed Purposes Act, prohibits the distribution and upkeep of the app whereas it’s beneath Chinese language possession.
The Folks’s Bid for TikTok goals emigrate TikTok to an open-source platform that permits customers extra management of their information, as a part of Undertaking Liberty’s mission to construct a extra user-empowered web.
The initiative companions with funding banking group Guggenheim Securities and regulation agency Kirkland & Ellis. Its backers embody digital security advocates, investor Kevin O’Leary and World Vast Net inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
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