The app’s CEO is fighting to keep it in the US
TikTok: A Disruption of Facebook, Twitter, and the Births of Parasociality: Google, Facebook, and Twitter for Sex Workers
With TikTok, however, transcendence is exchanged for immanence within the app. Where Google wants to give you access to the world, TikTok promises to reveal your deepest desires. TikTok has a diary of your unmediated inner self, which is a full-screen diary of your screens and links exploding.
In the mid 20th century, the transition from cinema to TV allowed moving images to enter our homes. Once constrained to the theater, this content began to live alongside us—we watched it as we got ready in the mornings, ate dinner, hosted guests, spent time with family. Theorists like Marshall McLuhan noticed that as moving pictures were taken out of the dark, anonymous communes of the theater and placed within our domestic spaces, the foundational mechanics of how we received, processed, and related to them changed. As newly engrained features of our dwellings—which Heidegger recognizes as deeply intertwined with our sense of being in the world—they took on a familiar casualness. Viewers increasingly developed “parasocial” relationships with the people they saw through these screens, as Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl note in the foundational paper in which they coin the term. Home audiences grew to see these mass media personas as confidants and friends, giving broadcasters the means to manipulate audiences at a more personal level.
Once, platforms sought to be device-agnostic, universal purveyors of content that would be accessible to anyone who might want it. As Kyle Chayka explained, this allowed companies to promise users that they would be able to use any device to do what they please, and follow anything or anyone they wanted when on the site. Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” is in many ways emblematic of this logic. The details of our encounters with these platforms have not been addressed in the discussions.
The move toward monetization also threatens to ruin a refuge: Since the FBI seized Backpage in April 2018, three days before President Trump signed FOSTA/SESTA into law, Twitter has become the sole major social media platform to tolerate sex workers. Even in the absence of direct payouts, Twitter has long been a safe haven for sex workers (adult content creators as well as in-person providers) in an increasingly puritanical digital landscape. In order for monetization to work, however, in order for its moderation practices to be strengthened, it is necessary that they be overhauled.
After those hearings, which followed disclosures from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen about Instagram’s impact on teens, the companies vowed to change. But the latest findings from the CCDH suggest more work may still need to be done.
But toolkits and guidance, while extremely helpful, still place the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the abused. Policymakers must also do their part to hold platforms responsible for combating chronic abuse. The Online Safety Bill of the UK could hold platforms responsible for stemming abuse. Large companies would have to make their policies on removing abusive content more clear under the bill. It would also legally require companies to offer users optional tools that help them control the content that they see on social media. However, debate of the bill has weakened some proposed protections of adults in the name of freedom of expression, and the bill still focuses on tools that help users make choices, rather than tools and solutions that work to stop abuse upstream.
For now, guardians must learn how to use the parental controls while also being mindful that teens can often circumvent those tools. Here’s a closer look at what parents can do to help keep their kids safe online.
After the leaked documents put a halt to the plan to release a version of the service for children under the age of 13, the company decided to focus on making its main service safer for young users.
The Safety Center at Facebook has resources such as articles and advice from leading experts. Liza Crenshaw, a Meta spokeswoman, stated that the Family Center will eventually allow parents and guardians to help their teens manage experiences across Meta technologies.
Another feature encourages users to take a break from the app by suggesting they take a deep breath, write something down, check a to-do list, or listen to a song after a certain amount of time. Instagram also said it’s taking a “stricter approach” to the content it recommends to teens and will actively nudge them toward different topics, such as architecture and travel destinations, if they’ve been dwelling on any type of content for too long.
In August, Snapchat introduced a parent guide and hub aimed at giving guardians more insight into how their teens use the app, including who they’ve been talking to within the last week (without divulging the content of those conversations). The feature requires parents and teens to give permission, and they have to create their own account.
TikTok: A Medical App to Share Videos about Body Image and Mental Health with the World’s Largest Social Media Network (CNN Business)
The company told CNN Business it will continue to build on its safety features and consider feedback from the community, policymakers, safety and mental health advocates, and other experts to improve the tools over time.
The researchers said they set up eight new accounts in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia at TikTok’s minimum user age of 13. The accounts liked some content relating to body image and mental health. The CCDH said the app recommended videos about body image and mental health about every 39 seconds within a 30-minute period.
In addition to parental controls, the app restricts access to some features to younger users, such as Live and direct messaging. A pop-up also surfaces when teens under the age of 16 are ready to publish their first video, asking them to choose who can watch the video. Push notifications are limited for account users of 13 to 15 years old.
Discord did not appear before the Senate last year but the popular messaging platform has faced criticism over difficulty reporting problematic content and the ability of strangers to get in touch with young users.
If a person is invited to the room by another person or if a user drops a channel link into a public group, it is possible for a minor to connect with people outside of the room. By default, all users — including users ages 13 to 17 — can receive friend invitations from anyone in the same server, which then opens up the ability for them to send private messages.
U.S. Social Media Critics of TikTok, an E-Commerce Embedded Company: The Case for Privacy Protection and Information Security
“We do know there’s Chinese ownership of the company that owns TikTok. And there are some people in the Commerce Committee that are looking into that right now,” Schumer, the Senate majority leader, told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News in a Sunday interview. We will see where they come out.
The ability of foreign governments to spread misinformation and undermine US elections via social media has been a concern of US lawmakers for years. Concerns—not necessarily rational—over privacy and data use have led to calls to ban the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok. Senators tell WIRED they worry about what antagonistic governments could learn from recent events in the financial system.
In recent weeks, numerous states have leapt on the bandwagon, further increasing the pressure on Congress to act. From Maryland to South Dakota, state government devices have been banned from TikTok.
The saga of TikTok’s struggles in Washington is nearing an end. As the company’s CEO testifies in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday, two widely different visions of the company will be on display.
McQuaide said that they would brief Congress on the plans that have been developed under the oversight of the country’s top national security agencies.
The TikTok Reputation in the Light of Recent Reports of User Misuse in ByteDance: A Unnerving Media Landscape
Even without overwhelming evidence of its potential to harm national security, TikTok’s reputation is not spotless. A number of reports have detailed instances in which ByteDance workers wrongfully accessed American user data, including the IP addresses of American journalists. TikTok admitted to the fact that the employees misused their authority.
The first version of the article appeared in theReliable Sources newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
It is being used widely in the U.S., unnerving government officials. In November, FBI Director Christopher Wray raised eyebrows after he told lawmakers that the app could be used to control users’ devices.
There are exceptions to the bill for law enforcement activities, national security interests and activities and security researchers.
In just two years, the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has roughly tripled, from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022. The video-sharing platform has reported high earnings the past year and has become especially popular among teens – two-thirds of whom report using it in some way – as well as young adults.
In a report published Wednesday, the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found that it can take less than three minutes after signing up for a TikTok account to see content related to suicide and about five more minutes to find a community promoting eating disorder content.
But parents have plenty to worry about kids online in addition to early exposure to pornography. A child can be affected by all manner of online content. As this week’s Supreme Court case reminds us, youth can be lured into extremism or self-harm via online content. It is a possibility that parents want to know if their child is becoming attracted to figures who share racist or misogynistic views online.
Why Do People Follow TikTok? Comments on Crime, Violence and Opinions in the Early Stages of Russia’s Invasion
The small sample size, the limited 30-minute window for testing, and the way the accounts scrolled past unrelated topics were reasons why a TikTok spokesman pushed back on the study.
TikTok told CNN that activity and resulting experience does not reflect real behavior or viewing experiences of real people. We provide access to supportive resources for those in need and we regularly consult with health experts. We’re mindful that triggering content is unique to each individual and remain focused on fostering a safe and comfortable space for everyone, including people who choose to share their recovery journeys or educate others on these important topics.”
The person said that people share empowering stories about eating disorder recovery and that the CCDH does not distinguish between positive and negative videos.
(After CNN sent a sample from this list of five accounts to Instagram for comment, the company removed them, saying they all broke Instagram’s policies against encouraging eating disorders.)
When a person searches for banned words such as self harm, they will only be taken to local support resources.
On March 10, two weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House convened a Zoom call with 30 prominent TikTok creators. The creators, who together had tens of millions of followers, were briefed by the White House and the National Security Council about the conflict and their goals and priorities. The White House recruited hundreds of TikTokers in the previous summer to help encourage young people to get vaccinations.
Big Tech is The Big B villain: What can Congress tell us about the issues facing tech giants like ByteDance, Amazon, Google and TikTok?
Lobbying isn’t the only reason some of these bills are difficult to pass. It’s much more challenging to impose sweeping regulations on an entire industry than it is to pass a bill governing how the US government handles its own technology.
The tech industry’s largest players have faced a kitchen sink of allegations in recent years. From knee-capping nascent rivals; to harming children and mental health; to undermining democracy; to spreading hate speech and harassment; to censoring conservative viewpoints; to bankrupting local news outlets; Big Tech has been made out as one of Washington’s largest villains.
Beckerman told CNN on Tuesday that they think a lot of the issues can be solved through the ongoing government negotiations.
Public records show ByteDance had 17 lobbyists and spent over two hundred thousand dollars on lobbying in 2019. The company spent more than $500,000 on lobbying at the end of last year.
Meta was the biggest internet industry lobbying giant last year, spending upward of $20 million. Next was Amazon at $19 million, then Google at almost $10 million. The parent company of TikTok spent less than one tenth of the amount on lobbying.
One of those bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), would erect new barriers between tech platforms’ various lines of business, preventing Amazon, for example, from being able to compete with third-party sellers on its own marketplace. A 16-month House antitrust investigation concluded in 2020 that a lot of the major tech companies were effectively monopolies.
For a brief moment this month, lawmakers seemed poised to pass a bill that could force Meta, Google and other platforms to pay news organizations a larger share of ad revenues. Meta warned it would have to remove news content from its platforms if the bill became law.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/washington-tiktok-big-tech/index.html
UC Berkeley vs. CICA: How Digital Social Media Impacts Business, Government, and Individual Users of the Internet and Cellular Data
Silicon valley’s biggest players have successfully defended their turf in Washington in the past.
By contrast, decisions about the rules government might impose on tech platforms have left the question of how those rules will affect different parts of the economy, from small businesses to individual users.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act helps protect companies from liability for what third-party users post on their platforms, but the lawsuit argues that the law doesn’t protect tech giants from their behavior.
The cross-cutting politics and the technical challenges of regulating an entire sector of technology, not to mention the potential consequences for the economy of screwing it up, have combined to make it genuinely difficult for lawmakers to reach an accord.
Social media research and teaching have become a staple in higher education. The app has fundamentally changed the nature of modern communication with its aesthetics, practices, storytelling, and information-sharing.
There is no doubt that media and communications professors must teach students how to create and distribute content if we are to teach a pillar of the modern media landscape. The TikTok service is still available to students in their own homes, however professors are not allowed to show TikTok links via web browser in the classroom as they are unable to put them into PowerPoint slides. Brands, companies, and novel forms of storytelling all rely on TikTok, and professors will no longer be able to train their students in best practices for these purposes. Students can see what they are learning about in real time, as part of the reason that TikTok makes parts of the world more accessible.
The world keeps turning as these states implement their bans, leaving their citizens disadvantaged in a fast-paced media world. Students from other states will be able to get education and training that is needed for media and communications students in the US, so they will be able to apply for jobs with a better skill set.
Professors do research as well. Social media scholars in these states quite literally cannot do what they have been hired to do and be experts in if these bans persist. While university compliance offices have said the bans may only be on campus Wi-Fi and mobile data is still allowed, who will foot that bill for one to pay for a more expensive data plan on their phone? The answer is no one. Professors are employees who have to be on campus frequently to show they are working, and that is why they work at home. This means any social media professor attempting to research TikTok on campus will have to rely on video streaming via mobile data, which can be quite expensive, either through having to individually pay for unlimited data, or accidentally going over one’s limits.
It is not clear if any other school districts have followed Seattle’s lead and filed a complaint against social media companies over harms their kids have suffered from.
It blames them for making it more difficult to educate students, and forcing schools to teach about social media and the effects of stress, as well as hiring additional mental health professionals.
“Plaintiff is not alleging Defendants are liable for what third-parties have said on Defendants’ platforms but, rather, for Defendants’ own conduct,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants affirmatively recommend and promote harmful content to youth, such as pro-anorexia and eating disorder content.”
The lawsuit says that from 2009 to 2019, there was on average a 30% increase in the number of Seattle Public Schools students who reported feeling “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row” that they stopped doing some typical activities.
What Happened to Joe Biden in State of the Union: How Come the Silicon Feasibility of the US House Republicans is Narrated
For some, the job on Thursday was casting the hearing’s only witness, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, as a stand-in for the Chinese government—in some cases, for communism itself—and then belting him like a side of beef. Some of the questions lawmakers put to Chew were vague, speculative, and immaterial. The members of Congress were not very interested in Chew’s answers to those questions.
We have made our concerns clear to TikTok. It is now time to continue the committee’s efforts to hold Big Tech accountable by bringing TikTok before the committee to provide complete and honest answers for people,” it added.
ByteDance, Inc., owners of the app, sued after the president of the US signed an executive order that banned the app nationwide.
It’s time for Congress to finally pass a comprehensive privacy law. With state privacy laws popping up across the US, Congress and the President need to create predictable rules and take back leadership in tech regulation. Congress can clearly define the kind of critical data that can be accessed in the US, in our allies, in neutral countries and in our adversaries.
If you talk to US House Republicans, President Joe Biden delivered an offensive, hyperpartisan diatribe last evening. Hell, if you just listened to the State of the Union address, you’d have heard the commander-in-chief heckled as a “liar,” blamed for the opioid epidemic—“It’s your fault!”—or heard him met with a thunderous and sustained Republican “BOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Most of the rowdy Republicans, who now control the gavels, televisions thermostats, and magnetometers, set aside their rowdy ways when Biden spoke to their common Silicon foe.
The Impact of Social Media on Teens: Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, and the Children of the U.S.
Data privacy, a bipartisan concern that has traditionally been split into partisan squabbling and indifference at the end of each congressional session, dominated the night. A popular line in a speech doesn’t mean the US will have a national privacy law in the near future
“You saw the people on both sides of the aisle stand up, so that’s a good sign,” says US senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat. There is a lot of data we are seeing already, teenagers, preteens, and it has a very, very negative impact on their self-esteem. So I think he is right, as the leader of our nation, to express and sound alarms of concern.”
Maintaining the status quo has become more difficult in recent years thanks to conservatives concerned with “censorship” or liberals worried about law enforcement in our new post-Rose v. Wade reality.
“Oh yeah. Senator Tina Smith from Minnesota, a Democrat, said it was a big deal. I think that we don’t really know, or understand, the impact of social media on kids. There is a lot of evidence that it is so dangerous that the child psychologists and experts that I speak to think so.
What social media can teach us about teen mental health: Implications for families, caregivers, schools, and parents: 10 useful lessons from the APA’s C.J. Prinstein
The statistics are not good. In the past year, nearly 1 in 3 teen girls reports seriously considering suicide. Almost one in five teens who identify as LGBTQ+ attempted suicide that time. Depression rates doubled for teens over the course of a decade. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The question is: Why now?
The APA’s chief science officer made clear, social media and the study of it are both too young to arrive at many conclusions with absolute certainty. In fact, when used properly, social media can feed teens’ need for social connection in healthy ways.
Prinstein’s 22-page testimony, along with dozens of useful footnotes, offers some much-needed clarity about the role social media may play in contributing to this teen mental health crisis. We have distilled it down to 10 useful lessons for busy parents, caregivers, and schools.
Humans are social creatures, and we learn from them. A number of studies have indicated that children’s relationships with peers have a long-term effect on their health and career later in life. These effects are stronger than the effects of children’s IQ, socioeconomic status, and educational attainment.”
This helps explain why social media has grown so quickly. But is the kind of social interaction they offer healthy?
What’s the right kind, you ask? According to Prinstein, it’s interactions and relationship-building “characterized by support, emotional intimacy, disclosure, positive regard, reliable alliance (e.g., ‘having each other’s backs’), and trust.”
“Research suggests that young people form and maintain friendships online. These relationships often afford opportunities to interact with a more diverse peer group than offline, and the relationships are close and meaningful and provide important support to youth in times of stress.”
That’s because, as children enter puberty, the areas of the brain “associated with our craving for ‘social rewards,’ such as visibility, attention, and positive feedback from peers” tend to develop well before the bits of the brain “involved in our ability to inhibit our behavior, and resist temptations,” Prinstein said. Social media platforms that reward teens with “likes” and new “followers” can trigger and feed that craving.
Hollywood has long grappled with parent groups who worry that violent or overly sexualized movies can have a negative effect on teen behavior. Well, similar fears, about teens witnessing bad behavior on social media, might be well-founded. But it’s complicated. Check out this one.
“Research examining adolescents’ brains while on a simulated social media site, for example, revealed that when exposed to illegal, dangerous imagery, activation of the prefrontal cortex was observed suggesting healthy inhibition towards maladaptive behaviors,” Prinstein told lawmakers.
Discrimination against race, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities is prevalent online and often targeted at young people. It’s more likely that LGBTQ+ youth are harassed, threats and self-harmed on social media.
Brain scans of adults and youths show that online harassment causes the same areas of the brain to respond to physical pain and create physical and mental health damage.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, youth who report any involvement with bully behavior are more likely to report high levels of suicide related behavior.
A video of a school attack that took place earlier in the month was posted on social media, and one girl took her own life.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1157180971/10-things-to-know-about-how-social-media-affects-teens-brains
The Big Picture: Using Social Media to Sustain Teen Self-Affidity on Social Media and Implications for Youth Mental Health
Even adults feel it. We go onto social media and compare ourselves to everyone else out there, from the sunsets in our vacation pics to our waistlines – but especially our waistlines and how we look, or feel we should look, based on who’s getting “likes” and who’s not. The impacts of such comparisons on teens can be amplified.
Exposure to this online content may be linked with lower self-esteem and distorted body perception among young people. This exposure can create a number of risk factors for eating disorders.
Research shows adolescents who are on screens right before bed can’t get the sleep they need. Poor sleep is linked to a variety of things, including poor mental health symptoms, poor performance in school and trouble regulating stress. In other words, youths’ preoccupation with technology and social media may deleteriously affect the size of their brains,” Prinstein said.
If you are willing to fly a balloon over the continental airspace and have people see it, what would keep you from weaponizing data? Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Marco Rubio thinks that an app on the phone of 60 million Americans could be used to influence political debate in this country.
Mike Rounds says that there is a lot of data that they are trying to gather, even small items can add up to more data. “There’s a huge amount of data out there, which will never be touched, never be used, but it’s the small pieces that add up. They are working it. They are patient. But they clearly see us as a threat, and they’re collecting data.”
“None of the suggested … efforts were particularly relevant to my concerns,” senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat of Colorado, told congressional reporters after hosting Chew in his office last week.
How much is too much? The case of Yankey, a 17-year-old man who discovered his social media use as a nuisance
How much is too much? Sometimes it’s hard to know. Sometimes, the answer is not hard to understand. It was for the man. He noticed that his use of social media, specifically TikTok, was becoming problematic when he was a college freshman.
“It just kind of started to really wear on me physically first, I think, because that was when I was just scrolling for hours, not going to sleep – it was taking hours out of my day. I wasn’t really doing much else in my free time,” he explained.
When his sense of worth was warped by the toll on his physical and mental faculties, he realized he needed to quit. He did it cold turkey, which was no easy feat.
Yankey is far from alone. According to a survey from the year 1942, over 70% of teens in the United States use TikTok, and among those that use it a small number use it almost constantly. That number is even higher among the 95% of teens who use YouTube, with 19% using it “almost constantly.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/24/health/screen-time-gupta-podcast-wellness/index.html
A Mediatrician for Children’s Addiction: The Case of Missing Sleep, Missing School and/or Awakening
For now, internet addiction is not an official clinical diagnosis. There are still questions about its classification as a mental health disorder and whether or not it should be treated with other mental health conditions. There are also questions about how to define it, measure it, test it and treat it.
Most experts do agree, though, that regardless of whether it is a true “addiction” or something else, too much screen time can have bad effects, especially for kids.
That is where Dr. Michael Rich comes in. Rich is a Mediatrician that treats young patients at the Clinic for Interactive Media Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The problem is when their day-to-day functions are impaired. They are not getting enough sleep. They are overeating. They are missing school or falling asleep in school. They are withdrawing from their friends.”
“We as a society use the term addiction as pejorative. We think of addicts as weak people with weak character … and we approach addiction, frankly, still as something to be punished rather than healed,” he said.
Laws and Practices of Electronic Communications: The Case of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice Critique of the YouTube Content Accountability
Editor’s Note: Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank and advocacy group based in Washington, DC. He was a senior policy adviser to the Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on Twitter. The views he expresses are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
This week, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that raised questions about free speech on the internet. Lawyers for the parents of a teenager killed in an Islamic State attack are trying to prove that YouTube should be held responsible for promoting the group’s content.
A lack of gun safety laws, an unwillingness to fund education or social programs—these things affect children, yet in many cases legislation and discussion around these issues ends in gridlock. And imploring legislators to “think of the children” rarely moves the needle. Where Big Tech is concerned, the focus on “the children” distracts from the more serious issues of data privacy, rampant data collection, outsized power of certain companies, and the cross-border nature of misinformation. Companies should be asking how long they can keep data. What should it be used for? Can private companies who want to cultivate the next generation of consumers ever be fined or coerced into setting time limits for young users? How are our systems at large enabling harms?
Parents are the Answer to Online Adolescent Sexual Exploration and Exploration: a Critique of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
This issue is something that nearly every parent has to navigate. A recent report from Common Sense Media shows that the age of first exposure to pornography is 12 and that three-quarters of teens have seen porn online by the age of 17.
A bipartisan effort to protect kids online could bear fruit. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would update the framework for how tech companies serve minors online, is being pushed by both Republican and Democrat senators.
Civil rights groups were opposed to the bill because they feared that it could make it difficult for kids to find information about sexual education without their parents’ knowledge. But that concern may ring hollow with parents who believe they should have better tools to know if their 13- or 14-year-old child is searching for information about birth control.
Parents should be in charge of their kids’ online activities, according to some. But we have laws relating to the minimum age to consume alcohol or drive a car precisely because we know adolescents’ brains are still developing, and the potential to cause harm to oneself or others is high. Unless a critical mass of families agrees to move social life offline, it may be missing out on crucial information or opportunities to socialize.
Indeed, some say the Blackburn-Blumenthal framework doesn’t go far enough. The policy solutions found in our recent report are a bit more aggressive than the ones included in KOSA, and still receive support from some parents.
U.S. Attorneys’ Order to Delete a Video App that Is Not For Information Use in Government Devices: A Model for Online Sexual Harassment
Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in guidance issued Monday that all executive agencies, and those they contract with, must delete any application from TikTok or its parent company, ByteDance, within 30 days of the notice, with few exceptions. Within 90 days, agencies must include in contracts that the short-form video app cannot be used on devices and must cancel any contracts that necessitate the app’s use.
The Chinese government could possibly pressure ByteDance to hand over information that could be used for intelligence or disinformation, according to US officials. According to CNN, independent security experts have said that type of access is a possibility, though there has not been any reported incident so far.
Canada will be banning the app from government devices on Tuesday, and the European Commission last week told people not to use the app on official devices because of security concerns.
We are all at risk of experiencing occasional harassment—but for some, harassment is an everyday part of life online. In particular, many women in public life experience chronic abuse: ongoing, persistent, and often coordinated attacks that are threatening and frequently sexual. Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, for example, have both suffered widely reported abuses online. Similarly, a recent UNESCO report detailing online violence against women journalists found that Nobel Prize–winning journalist Maria Ressa and UK journalist Carole Cadwalladr faced attacks that were “constant and sustained, with several peaks per month delivering intense abuse.”
Platforms need to do more to enhance safety-by-design, including upstream solutions such as improving human content moderation, dealing with user complaints more effectively, and pushing for better systems to take care of users who face chronic abuse. Efforts to educate people about online abuse of women and marginalized people are part of the work of organizations like Glitch, which is also trying to give people resources to tackle these attacks, and push platform companies to improve their reporting mechanisms.
A bipartisan group of US senators are demanding that intelligence officials and tech experts be given access to them. These lawmakers fear that US financial institutions could be vulnerable to social-media-induced bank runs and that malicious actors could use misinformation and bots to manipulate public opinion and create chaos in the financial system.
It became obvious that Silicon Valley Bank had made a bad bet on long-dated government debt, which led to the bank collapsing. Many of its customers were venture capitalists and tech company founders, some of whom spread news (and speculation) on WhatsApp, Slack and social media, driving a panic some analysts and lawmakers think helped accelerate the bank’s demise.
A Conversation with Shou Chew on Twitter: Preventing Wall Street Walls by Using Social Media to Drive Deep Market Fluctuations
He was nervous while walking onto the Senate floor and he had a voice that said he didn’t want people at the Capitol to hear him. “I’m nervous.”
Banking regulators have been aware of social media’s potential to drive wild movements in public markets since 2021, when shares in Gamestop, a video game retailer, shot from $20 to $483 over a two-week period, before plummeting back down. The Securities and Exchange Commission blamed investment forums on Reddit for fueling the episode.
In recent years, members of the Intelligence Committee have received a number of briefings on the potential for manipulating US markets with deepfakes.
Mike Rounds is a Republican from South Dakota, and he says that his competitors use social media to increase fear in Americans. “They’re very good at it. They use a system of bots in which they can magnify and intentionally distort fears or legitimate concerns.”
We learned that TikTok has 7,000 American employees, which is less than the 10,000 or more that it wanted to hire in 2020, but a big leap over the 1,400 US employees that year.
At a Harvard Business Review conference earlier this month, where executives, professors and artists appeared for talks on corporate leadership and emotional intelligence, Shou Chew attempted to save his company.
In his video on Tuesday, he spoke to users of the app. The CEO asked them to write in the comments section to share “what you want your elected representatives to know about what you love about TikTok.”
Dozens of social media creators are on the steps of the Capitol, some of which have been flown out there by TikTok. The company is spending a lot of money for advertisements in the Beltway. Last week it put out a docuseries about American small business owners who rely on the platform for their livelihoods.
Attempts by Chew to discuss TikTok’s business practices were often interrupted and his requests to comment on matters of great interest to members of Congress were blocked and occasionally ignored. These opportunities to get the CEO on record, while under oath, were repeatedly blown in the name of expediency and for mostly theatrical reasons. Chew, in contrast, was the portrait of patience, even when he was being talked over. Even when some lawmakers began asking and, without pause, answering their own questions.
The stories of American small business owners were covered in the series. A Mississippi soap maker who built her company on the app, and an educator who quit his job for TikTok to teach toddlers how to read are featured in the first of the 60-second clips.
The list of expected attendees includes a disabled Asian American creator using her platform to combat ableism, a small business owner from South Carolina who launched a greeting card company via TikTok, and an Ohio-based chef who built her bakery business via the app. Some of the creators have hundreds of thousand or even millions of followers on TikTok.
TikTok, WeChat, and China: A Mechanistic Chinese App to Enter the U.S. Culture and Communicate with the World
Sherman believes that the PR push won’t be persuasive because of how divided Washington is right now.
The top Democrat in the Congress says that the problem with China has gotten more attention and that there is more awareness of it.
TikTok has penetrated the U.S. culture. Trader Joe’s features a section which is similar to the section on TikTok. Tables dedicated to #BookTok can be found in Barnes & Noble stores. And, of course, TikTok has perhaps had the most obvious influence on the music industry; trending songs on TikTok find commercial success and land at the top of the charts.
Zhou’s mother was able to keep her job because of the banned US-owned messaging services, but they have now turned to WeChat, a Chinese platform run by a tech giant. The app has around 19 million daily active users in the US. Zhou’s mom is dependent on the app to stay connected to family overseas and to the Chinese community in the US.
It is called a messaging app but it is much more than that. It is relatively easy to create businesses and communities on the platform, which integrates social media and ecommerce features. People in Asian diasporas, and those who live and work in Asian communities in the US, use the app to make connections, talk to relatives back home, read news updates, share virtual hóng bāo 红包 (red envelopes of money), and post updates in their friend feed.
The Information War: Why China and India Are Ready to Pull the Grig on Communist Social Media? The Case of Xi Jinping
Alex Stamos is a founding partner of the Krebs Stamos Group as well as founder and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Prior to launching KSG and the SIO, Alex served as the chief security officer of Facebook and as the chief information security officer at Yahoo. The views he gives are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
We are clearly at the start of a long struggle between the world’s democracies and a new coalition of autocracies, led by a Chinese Communist Party that is emerging from the Covid-19 crisis with its most autocratic leader since Mao Zedong and a burning desire to demonstrate the power of the People’s Republic domestically and abroad.
The visit this week of Chinese President Xi Jinping to a crippled, battered and disgraced Vladimir Putin, highlighted the chinese leader’s new role, as he legitimized the Russian president who was indicted by the international Criminal Court for war crimes last week. In the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait and disputed Japanese waters, China’s rapidly growing military continues to push boundaries and prepare for conflicts with its neighbors and the West.
The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, said that social media can be used for foreign influence operations. I do not believe they are doing it right now. But why would we wait until President Xi and China says, ‘I’m ready to pull the trigger and invade Taiwan’?”
It turns out that there’s no law governing the access that Beijing or Moscow-based employees of tech companies have to personal data of US citizens. There is no federal law that discourages the collection of critical data or personally identifiable information.
Civil society and academic researchers may be able to get a legal level of transparency from the social networks they use. These groups work with key American social media companies to find and analyze campaigns to manipulate both American and global politics, playing an important role in informing citizens and journalists of the kinds of campaigns that may target them.
In order for the US and our allies to seriously engage in the information war, both by protecting and supporting journalists who are able to operate independently, and by building civil society coalitions that create public resiliency against the Chinese-style censorship that is invading countries such as India and Turkey, they need
Washington is correct to deal with the immediate risks posed by the single chess piece of TikTok, but it should also see the whole board and plan for the next 20 moves. It is the history of the 21st century that depends on it.
Taking his seat before dozens of House Energy and Commerce Committee members Thursday, he opened a packet of notes, diligently indexed with sticky notes. Many of the people who would be questioning him had already made up their minds about whether or not the app was safe, so it came as a surprise that there was a sheet in the packet.
One of the first things Chew heard when the hearing started was that his platform should be banned. Chair McMorris-Rodgers spoke of that in her opening statement. Her mind was made up, as were a lot of the committee members, and she was berated for everything from what she did to her food.
Earlier this month, Warner introduced the RESTRICT Act, a bipartisan-backed bill that would authorize the Secretary of Commerce with the power to investigate and ban the use of technologies derived from adversarial countries. At least 18 senators spanning both parties and the Biden administration have come out in support of the bill.
But it was not lost on Chew that American companies have made similar mistakes in the past. “With a lot of respect, American social companies don’t have a good track record with data privacy and user security,” Chew said. Look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, for an example.
In Cambridge Analytica’s case, Facebook settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $5 billion. Legislative debate on a federal data privacy network started after the scandal. Years later, Congress has yet to approve any meaningful data protections governing US or foreign-owned social media companies.
Do Short-Form Video Platforms Compete with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter? An Investor’s Observation on TikTok
TikTok features have been copied by many of the largest US social media companies which would make it easier for creators and users to shift away from the platform. In 2020, the social media platform introduced a short-form video tool called Reels. There are a number of platforms with a video feed like a TikTok-esque one.
“Obviously, if a ban is approved and enforced, the content, user count and engagement, and likely ad dollars for Snap, Instagram, and YouTube will increase,” said Ali Mogharabi, an analyst at financial services firm Morningstar, in a recent investor’s note.
If that happens, Lian Jye Su, an analyst with ABI Search, believes users will follow their favorite TikTok influencers and content creators wherever they go.
At least one company is already seeing a boost. Federal officials are trying to get a ban on Tik Tok put in place, and that has caused the stock to rise for the days prior to its appearance before Congress.
“Most users will flock to where the content creators go next,” Su said. Content creators will still prefer places that let them monetize their content, as evidenced by the fact that some of them stand to benefit the most.
Smaller platforms have the opportunity to gain ground, too, Su said. Short-form video platform Triller, which reportedly has over 450 million users, is actively courting popular content creators from TikTok with cash bonuses, partnerships and other incentives to switch platforms. Meanwhile, Dubsmach – a Reddit-owned short video platform – and Clash, which allows people to create 21-second looping videos, are other platforms that could be increasingly appealing to creators.
According to Raja Krishnamoordhi, he doesn’t think the app will go dark. He said a sale is most likely.
A possibly more trusted US TikTok may make it more difficult to attract users away from or keep them from moving to TikTok, according to an investor’s note.
What is wrong with a Chinese asshole? The case against China in the wake of the Huawei CFO and daughter of Alibaba founder Jack Ma
China’s reach in this regard is wide, and its ability to exert influence is powerful. When Canada arrested the CFO and daughter of Huawei’s founder in 2018, China retaliated by arresting two Canadians and retrying and sentencing a third to death. The political system in China gives the government the ability to put lots of pressure on firms in China to spy on other countries and turn in data, says a University of Toronto professor.
China retaliated against its own citizens. When Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, spoke out against planned tech regulation, he seemed to disappear in a similar fashion to the famous actress Fan Bingbing (her crime was failing to pay enough taxes).
Between their obsession with communism, their often obnoxious and condescending tone, and the occasional assumption that Chew was Chinese, despite his repeated reminders that he is Singaporean, the hearing was a weird, brutal, xenophobic mess. And users on TikTok took notice.
This issue is related to the campaign against a single, wildly popular app. Its very engaged users will notice you’re being an asshole! Congress was in good shape yesterday since they have been in rare form since the first call for a ban by Trump.
I don’t think the plan to get people to rethink using TikTok was successful. Not if our FYP feeds are any indication.
According to a press statement, the Center for Countering Digital Hate believes that the algorithm will continue to put users at risk unless it has legally mandated safety by design, transparency, and accountability. “Congress owes it to America’s parents today to get answers.”
Yet just 24 hours before Chew sat under congressional questioning, students at Denver’s East High School fled their classrooms during yet another school shooting. The free school lunches program for children expired earlier this year, and was replaced by an income-based system that will make it difficult for children with the greatest need to go to school. Poverty is a problem in the US because of issues of economic disparity and an eroded social safety net.
