【观点】TikTok或将成为Pinterest式的平台？亿万富翁麦卡特试图改变。
本周，我采访了前洛杉矶道奇队的所有者弗兰克·麦克卡特，探讨他对于收购美国版TikTok的兴趣。在美国政府试图从当前所有者字节跳动手中夺取这家社交媒体公司之际，这成为了热议话题。（字节跳动由中国的创业者创建，虽然其大部分管理层并非中国人。）
TikTok之所以令人上瘾，在于其算法比其他社交应用更加精准地提供用户难以抗拒的内容。算法会不断推送用户浏览的视频类型，例如肌肉锻炼内容，于是用户整天接收到相同类型的视频。它的目标是尽可能长时间保持用户的在线时间。
相比之下，Pinterest不太刺激人的欲望。在2022年担任公司首席执行官之后，Bill Ready下令改变其算法，以让用户获取主动请求的内容，比如家居装饰技巧等，并非人们偶尔好奇但并不经常寻找的暴力车祸内容。
“当我接手时，我们在模仿TikTok，和其他人一样。”他对我说，“目标用户要的是‘最大化浏览时间’。现在我们试图帮助他们在现实生活中过上他们喜爱的生活。”
Ready补充说，Pinterest旨在迎合人们的“楼上大脑”，而不是“楼下大脑”。
我乐见TikTok减少成瘾性，并且这一变化也符合其许多核心用户的期望。一项由哈里斯民意调查进行的调查显示，47%的Z世代受访者表示：“如果TikTok从未被发明就好了”。完全有50%的人表示同样的感受针对X/Twitter。（来源：纽约大学斯特恩商学院的社会心理学家Jonathan Haidt与哈里斯民意调查的首席执行官Will Johnson在《纽约时报》意见版的一篇客座文章中提出。）
为实现这一愿景，麦克卡特邀请Ready和Haidt参加了一场记者午餐会。而Haidt的最新书籍标题则清晰表明了立场：“焦虑一代：科技革命对儿童的影响引发了精神健康危机”。
实现这一切之前还有许多挑战。首先，TikTok必须上市出售。公司正在试图推翻今年4月国会通过的《保护美国人免受外国敌对手段控制的应用法案》，该法律要求字节跳动在1月19日前关闭或出售美国运营的TikTok。
即使法律被裁定无效后，字节跳动也可能选择关闭而非销售业务。即便如此，如果销售确实进行，麦卡特也未必能赢得竞标权。他的公司Project Liberty需要组织一组投资者，以支付数十亿美元的价格购买此资产。前美国总统特朗普的财政部长Steven Mnuchin是潜在的竞争对手之一，华尔街日报报道前电子艺界首席执行官Bobby Kotick也有意组建买家团队参与竞购，并可能还有其他人。
在与麦卡特进行本周访谈时，我问了他如果能够克服所有障碍并接管TikTok，接下来会发生什么。首先，他的名字不会改变。其次，他不希望保留当前的算法系统（称为“推荐引擎”），中国当局表示不允许外国实体获得此类权限。
相反，麦克卡特计划在相同的网络协议基础上重建TikTok——这是MeWe平台的基础架构。MeWe是一个规模较小但致力于尊重个人隐私、避免算法操控的社交网络，允许真实的亲密关系与团体繁荣发展。将1.7亿美国每月活跃用户加入其中，该协议将成为一个重大玩家。
然而，他的目标是保持TikTok现在的视觉风格和感觉。这似乎与其想要让用户看到自己选择的内容而非被平台引导到任何内容之间存在一些矛盾。（尽管 TikTok主要根据用户的过往浏览习惯推送信息，但也允许用户表示对其不喜欢的帖子的反感，以便减少类似内容。）向用户询问他们想看什么似乎会从根本上改变视觉体验。
此外，麦克卡特也提到用户将更有可能选择愿意分享的个人信息量。我认为这是个好的目标，但在实践中，人们可能为了获取所需的内容而透露大量关于自己的信息。
除了这些例外情况外，我认同McCourt对于TikTok未来潜力的良好愿景或许能够实现某天Z世代不再梦想着它的消失。
在MIT经济学博士项目中我比邓尼斯·卡尔顿高一年级。之后我在各个咨询公司工作过，包括创建了自己的公司——Brattle Group。我作为经济专家出庭作证的次数不少。
您的对David Evans和Competition Policy International的轻蔑态度值得公开道歉。我自CPI成立以来一直与之合作（并与David Evans的关系远比那更久），我相信CPI确实如它声称那样行事，并且在国际反垄断社区中受到广泛尊重。
Richard Schmalensee,波士顿
拥有超过40年的经济专家经验，我在经历中发现，金钱往往找那些说他们想听的话的人，而非学术界人士表达自己所知的。当然，学术领域存在腐败可能，但很多学者都因坚持正确而感到骄傲——无论其他人怎么看。
Andrew Novakovic,密尔沃基
请在讨论能源、我们追捧的智能手机以及电池产能强国时提及民主刚果童工开采钴矿的情况，这是让自拍成为可能的事情。
Ginger Sinsabaugh,利马，秘鲁
“现在的交易系统确实存在问题，但反向情况更糟糕：很难想象如果主要势力之间没有经济利益和稳定繁荣的共同机制，国际安全会得到更好保障。”
——世界贸易组织总干事Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala，“为什么全球化仍有价值：重思而非抛弃全球化的案例”，《外交政策》（2023年6月8日）
新闻来源：www.nytimes.com
原文地址：Opinion | Can TikTok Be Reformed? This Billionaire Wants to Try.
新闻日期：2024-09-27
原文摘要：
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.) McCourt invited Ready and Haidt to a lunch for journalists this week. The title of Haidt’s latest book leaves no doubt where he stands: “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Several things would have to happen before McCourt could carry out his plan for TikTok. First, TikTok would have to be for sale. The company is trying to get the courts to overturn the law that Congress passed in April, called the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary-Controlled Applications Act, which requires ByteDance to shut down or sell the U.S. operation of TikTok by Jan. 19. Even if ByteDance loses the case, it may choose to shut down the operation rather than sell it. And even if it does sell, McCourt may not win the bidding. Project Liberty, which he founded, would have to put together a group of investors that could swing a purchase price of billions of dollars. Steven Mnuchin, who was President Trump’s Treasury secretary, is a possible rival bidder. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bobby Kotick, the former chief executive of Activision, the videogame publisher, has also floated the idea of forming a buyers’ group. And there could be others. When I interviewed McCourt this week, I asked him what would happen if he clears all those hurdles and TikTok becomes his. For one thing, he wouldn’t change the name. For another, he doesn’t even want the algorithm, or “recommendation engine,” which the Chinese government has indicated it would not allow a foreign entity to acquire. Instead, McCourt would rebuild TikTok on top of the same network protocol that now underlies MeWe, a much smaller social network that says it is “engineered to respect personal privacy and avoid algorithmic manipulation — allowing for authentic relationships and community to thrive.” Adding the 170 million monthly U.S. users of TikTok would turn the protocol from an interesting experiment to a major player. Yet his goal is to keep TikTok’s look and feel, he told me. That seems to contradict, at least a little bit, his desire to give customers a chance to view what they want, instead of being led to whatever TikTok dishes up. (While TikTok mainly goes by people’s past viewing habits, it also allows its users to effectively dislike posts so they see fewer like them.) Asking users what they want to see would be a big change in the look and feel, it seems to me. McCourt also said that customers would be better able to choose what information about themselves they would be willing to share. I think that’s a good goal, but in practice I imagine that customers would divulge quite a lot about themselves if that’s the price for getting the content they want. Those caveats aside, I think McCourt has a good vision for what TikTok could become. Maybe someday Gen Z will stop wishing that it never existed. I was a year ahead of Dennis Carlton in the economics Ph.D. program at M.I.T. I have since worked as an economic consultant at various consulting firms, including the Brattle Group, which I founded with several colleagues. I have testified as an economic expert many times. You basically said that he made $100 million as an economic expert because he wins cases. That characterization is seriously misleading because it ignores the critical difference between attorneys and experts. Attorneys win or lose cases — not experts. The attorney is an advocate whose obligation is to do everything possible to prevail for the client. The sole role of the expert is to assist the finder of fact — be it a judge, a mediator, an arbitrator or a jury. When an expert crosses the line into becoming an advocate, all their credibility is lost. Kenneth WiseAlamo, Calif. Your snide treatment of David Evans and Competition Policy International merits a public apology. I have been associated with C.P.I. since its founding (and with David Evans for longer than that), and I believe C.P.I. is exactly what it claims to be and is broadly respected within the global antitrust community. Richard SchmalenseeBoston I have over 40 years of experience as an economic expert. In my experience, it’s more that money finds the voices that are saying what they want to hear, not that academic voices speak what they know will be rewarded in money or fame. No doubt there are those in the academic community who are corruptible, but a lot of academic pride (hubris?) is held in being right, no matter what others might think. Andrew NovakovicMilwaukee Please, if you report about energy and our fancy cellphones and which country is the king of battery power, please mention the child slaves in the Democratic Republic of Congo mining cobalt who make sending selfies possible. Ginger SinsabaughLima, Peru “There are real problems with the current trading system, but the counterfactual scenario is almost certainly worse: It is difficult to believe that international security would be better served if leading powers had no economic stake in one another’s stability and prosperity and no shared institutions in which to engage.” — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, “Why the World Still Needs Trade: The Case for Reimagining — Not Abandoning — Globalization,” Foreign Affairs (June 8, 2023)
