Billionaire Frank McCourt's TikTok bid wins key backer as he looks past app's prized algorithm

• Billionaire Frank McCourt is part of a group interested in buying TikTok to create a new platform where users can control their data.
• His bid has gotten interest from private investors, pension funds, philanthropies and parents whose children died as a result of interactions on social media.
• TikTok parent company ByteDance has repeatedly said it will not sell the app and sued to block the law that requires it to divest of the viral video app.

In the race to buy TikTok, billionaire Frank McCourt is pitching investors with a chance to create a new platform that gives users the ability to control their own data. 

"I don't want to own TikTok," he told reporters Thursday. "I don't want to be the CEO of a social media platform. I want a new internet. A new improved alternative to what we have."

McCourt's move comes at a time when concerns about data privacy and child safety online have led to dozens of bills at the state level, and a bipartisan push to move federal legislation.

His pitch has drawn a key group: Parents whose children died after being influenced by social media or bullied on various platforms.

"Once Frank's built the infrastructure and the public finds out that there's a safer way to go, a more profitable way to go, then the people will start coming," said Sam Chapman, who said his son Sammy died from a fentanyl overdose after buying drugs on Snapchat.

Chapman said McCourt's vision would appeal to "hundreds of thousands of parents" who are seeking a safer internet for their kids. 

As a business executive and philanthropist, McCourt spent years advocating for a new internet in which a user's data is owed by the user. He founded the non-profit Project Liberty to build a healthier version of social media. Project