The plan to decentralize TikTok

The fight over the future of TikTok’s US operations has been a rollercoaster, to say the least. In January, the Supreme Court upheld the decision to ban the app in the US because its Chinese owner, ByteDance, had failed to sell it to a US-based company. However, President Trump granted the company a 75-day extension to find a buyer. 

Now days away from the new deadline of April 5, the popular short-video app, which has 170 million American users, is facing another possible shutdown. Several companies and networks have made offers for TikTok and are negotiating with the White House, despite ByteDance not confirming it would accept any bid. While the Trump administration has reportedly been in “serious” talks with Oracle as a front-runner, other bidders include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, YouTuber MrBeast, tech entrepreneur Jesse Tinsley, and Perplexity AI. 

Also: Tired of traditional social media? Here are 4 reasons why Substack is my go-to social media app

However, only one offer — made by a consortium led by billionaire Frank McCourt through his organization, Project Liberty — wants to radically change how the app operates. Named The People’s Bid, Project Liberty’s offer would decentralize TikTok, claiming to give users more autonomy in where their data goes, how their content is monetized, and, overall, a say in how the platform operates. 

ZDNET spoke with Project Liberty’s president, investor, and technologist Tomicah Tillemann, about what that app could look like. 

A more democratic social network 

The goal of a decentralized network is to democratize control of and access to tech systems by replacing a single-company hierarchy with community-run infrastructure. The debate about the potential for decentralized social networks intensified as users expressed concern at being at the whims of one individual, especially following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, in 2022.

Email is an example of a decentralized network, which is also known as a fediverse — anyone with an email address, regardless of the domain, can email anyone else. Long before its bid for TikTok, Project Liberty released the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) in 2021, an open-source protocol that creates a universal social graph, or network of social media connections, that isn’t tied to a specific platform. This structure allows for portability between platforms, making it much easier to leave X for Bluesky, for example, and greater user data protections and content controls. 

Also: Can Digg’s return fix what ails social media today? Reddit’s cofounder is betting on it

“Our vision for TikTok involves really prioritizing principles of interoperability,” Tillemann said. “So, the community that you help to create on TikTok and cultivate wouldn’t just be on TikTok. You’d have the opportunity to port that community to other platforms if you want to.” Tillemann said the same principle would apply to content posted to TikTok: it would be “shareable in real time with permissions across other platforms.”

In 2022, Project Liberty brought the social network MeWe onto the DSNP. As part of the shift, the organization said at the time that MeWe users would eventually be able to inform product developments. Project Liberty hopes to bring this kind of community-run vision to TikTok.

But why buy TikTok? Why not just build a new social media site, or invest more in MeWe? 

Tillemann acknowledged that building decentralized networks from the ground up can be tough. “There are really powerful network effects that all benefit the incumbents right now,” he said. “It’s really hard to generate those from scratch in the current environment. It’s much simpler, in our view, to decentralize an existing platform.” 

Also: Miss the old Facebook? The ‘friends-only’ tab is here to help you reclaim your feed

However, he also noted that several roadblocks lie ahead. 

Tillemann said Project Liberty has seen a “real appetite” for decentralization, but making it work for legacy platforms is challenging: “That’s one of the things that we’ve really focused on in the development of technology that we’ve pursued at Project Liberty.”

Another concern is user experience: “As somebody who’s been active in the space for a very long time and has a lot of admiration for the creativity and dynamism that exists within the web, the technologies remain very inaccessible for a lot of people,” he said. “The user experience is not great, and we need to solve that.”

Tillemann said Project Liberty’s plan to convert TikTok would be “very clean,” and users wouldn’t need to worry about backend infrastructure, tokens, or the additional labor involved in running decentralized networks. 

Also: Meta’s Community Notes test begins – with X’s algorithm

Project Liberty’s goal is to use TikTok as an example of a greater, better model for the future of the internet. “TikTok is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a platform that, yes, will be a very successful commercial technology opportunity, but is also potentially going to be a piece of critical digital infrastructure,” he said. 

“We have the opportunity to take what’s currently a pretty substantial challenge for the internet in terms of how we deal with the national security and the data security issues around TikTok, and transform that into a big solution that we hope is going to help address a variety of concerns that people are struggling with right now in the digital world.”

Increased data privacy for users

DSNP’s primary selling point for individuals might be its user-led data controls, the lack of which has plagued social media for over a decade. 

“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. 

Also: This new tool lets you see how much of your data is exposed online – and it’s free

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.

Also: Instagram is testing a Discord-like feature – for you and 249 friends

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.” 

Also: How new Facebook policies incentivize spreading misinformation

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 stop gap,” during the technical transition. 

Also: TikTok rolls out a new Security Checkup tool. Here’s how it works

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. 

Also: How TikTok’s enhanced desktop app challenges YouTube in game streaming – and more

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. 

“They understand that they are not primary beneficiaries of the economic value that’s being generated on the platform,” said Tillemann. “Part of the reason that we have called our effort The People’s Bid is because we want the creators and others on the platform to share in the economics.”

Also: Instagram makes ‘Teen Accounts’ private by default – and AI will be checking your age

He said Project Liberty aims to keep existing revenue streams active alongside “new mechanisms for providing creators with more direct ownership in the platform.”

“That’s candidly hard to do given some of the existing regulatory limitations,” he said. “We are very committed over the longer term to getting that piece of it right and thinking creatively about how you could evolve some of the existing limitations in securities law in a manner that would make it possible for more inclusive economics as part of the way the platforms operate.”

What’s next? 

Regardless of whether the sale goes through, Tillemann said Project Liberty is committed to a decentralized future for social media. 

“The acquisition of TikTok [is] a way to compress time,” he said. “We’re pretty convinced that we’re going to get there one way or another, regardless of whether we get TikTok. We’re in discussions with a lot of amazing platforms right now, and we’re excited about TikTok, but it’s certainly not the only platform that we are working with or working toward implementing these changes.”

He said those potential other partners can help foster a larger ecosystem of better, value-driven social media. But he added that TikTok is uniquely powerful in this area: “If you can get the cultural engine of the internet to embrace these principles, a lot of things get pretty easy quickly.”