Can TikTok Be Reformed? This Billionaire Wants to Try.

TikTok will be a little bit more like Pinterest if the billionaire Frank McCourt succeeds in acquiring it. Which is kind of like saying that professional wrestling will become more like croquet.

This week I interviewed McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, about his interest in the American operation of TikTok, which the U.S. government is trying to pry away from its current owner, ByteDance. (ByteDance was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, although it notes that most of its owners aren’t Chinese.)

What makes TikTok so addictive is that its algorithm, even more than those of other social media apps, is fine-tuned to give you more and more of the content that you can’t tear yourself away from. If the algorithm sees that you linger over videos of muscle-building, it will feed you muscle-building videos all day long. Its goal is to retain your eyeballs for as long as possible.

Pinterest doesn’t tease the id so much. When Bill Ready became the company’s chief executive in 2022, he ordered its algorithm changed so that people would get content that they deliberately requested. Home decorating tips, for example. Probably not gory car crashes, which people typically don’t ask for, but will stare at despite their better judgment.

“When I came in, we were cloning TikTok, like everybody else,” he told me. The goal for users was “maximizing view time. Now we’re trying to help them have a life in the real world that they love.”

Pinterest appeals to customers’ “upstairs brains,” not their “downstairs brains,” Ready added.

I would be happy for TikTok to become less addictive, and so would many of its target customers. Forty-seven percent of Gen Z respondents to a Harris Poll agreed with the statement “I wish TikTok had never been invented,” as Will Johnson, the chief executive of the Harris Poll, and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a Times Opinion guest essay last week. (Fully 50 percent said the same of X/Twitter.)