Distinguishing between Social Media and the Phone in TikTok: A Case Study in Sexual Exploitation and the Facebook-OnlyFans Project

As a result, we have missed a central part of TikTok operating logic: the phone. A failure to fully explore the role of this device has resulted in a limited appreciation of how the platform works, as it is not just content, but a medium and context that inform how we receive information through a given channel.

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. The paper by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl explains the term “parasocial”, which refers to viewers developing a close relationship with people they see on screens. Audiences saw mass media personas as close to them and gave broadcasters the means to manipulate them at a personal level.

Once, platforms sought to be device-agnostic, universal purveyors of content that would be accessible to anyone who might want it. Kyle Chayka says that companies were able to promise users that they could use any device if they wanted to, and that they could follow anyone 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 encounter with these platforms have never been the focus of discussions.

One of many ways homophobia, transphobia, and whorephobia—the systemic oppression of sex workers—overlap is that we are all perceived as threats to children. Online sex work is not immune from this bias. Earlier this year, Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer reported in The Verge that Twitter had been developing an “OnlyFans-style” subscription project, but efforts were stymied by fears over child sexual exploitation material (CSEM, sometimes referred to as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM). The Red Team decided that adult content monetization would cause more harm than good and they didn’t think that the project could be rolled out before getting a handle on CSEM. The project was tabled in May, a few months after Musk made an offer to buy the social networking site.

Talking about the harms platforms can have on children often feels less like genuine concern and more like an attempt to capture attention by focusing on some of the most salient fears for American parents. One of the most important avenues for bipartisan cooperation is to focus on young users, so it makes perfect sense that this is where the monster would prefer to make sure children are protected.

The burden of responsibility still remains on the abused despite the helpfulness of toolkits. Policymakers must also do their part to hold platforms responsible for combating chronic abuse. The UK’s Online Safety Bill is one mechanism that could hold platforms responsible for tamping down abuse. The bill would force large companies to make their policies on removing abusive content and blocking abusers clearer in their terms of service. 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.

The company recently refreshed its Safety Center where parents can find information about how to turn on safety settings, ask questions about how datememe datememe works, and talk about online safety with teens. There is an option to prevent a minor from receiving a friend request from someone they do not know.

The plan to make its main service safer for young users was put on hold after the leak of documents.

The Facebook Safety Center has a lot of resources and articles from leading experts. Meta has a vision of eventually allowing parents and their teens to manage their experiences across Meta technologies from one place.

Another feature encourages users to take a break from the app, such as suggesting they take a deep breath, write something down, check a to-do list or listen to a song, after a predetermined 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.

While this was Snapchat’s first formal foray into parental controls, it did previously have a few existing safety measures for young users, such as requiring teens to be mutual friends before they can start communicating with each other and prohibiting them from having public profiles. Teen users have their Snap Map location-sharing tool off by default but can also use it to disclose their real-time location with a friend or family member even while their app is closed as a safety measure. In addition, a Friend Checkup tool encourages users of Snapchat to make sure they still keep in touch with the people on their friend lists.

TikToks: a social-safety messaging platform for young people with complex and mature themes and discord. The trial of a video discord maker

The company told CNN Business that it will build on its safety features, consider feedback from policymakers, safety and mental health advocates, and other experts, and improve the tools over time.

In July, TikTok announced new methods to remove mature or potentially problematic videos. Thematurity score was assigned to videos detected as potentially containing mature or complex themes. It also rolled out a tool that aims to help people decide how much time they want to spend on TikToks. The tool lets users set regular screen time breaks, and provides a dashboard that details the number of times they opened the app, a breakdown of daytime and nighttime usage and more.

In addition to parental controls, the app restricts access to some features to younger users, such as Live and direct messaging. When teenagers under the age of 16 are ready to make their first video, there is a pop-up asking if they want to watch it. The Push notifications are reduced for ages 13 to 15 and for 16 to 17 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 the person is invited by another person in the room, or if the user dropped the channel link into the group, it is possible to connect with strangers on public server or in private chats. 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.

The Case against the United States for a Security-Preserving Social Media App TikTok (aka The Biden Effect), a Platform of the Chinese Government

Over the last few months alone, Republicans and Democrats have rallied behind legislation barring TikTok from operating in the US. Intelligence officials have labeled the app as a tool of the Chinese government, and the Biden administration has supported the company into a corner. If ByteDance does not agree to find a replacement for TikTok, it will be banned.

The proposed legislation would block and prohibit transactions in the United States by social media companies with at least one million monthly users that are based in or under influence of countries that are considered foreign adversaries, such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba.

The United States is likely to ban federal employees from using the short-form video app TikTok, which they have been using on government-issued phones and tablets.

The case against TikTok isn’t hard to make. The owners of TikTok fear that the Chinese government might try to get them to hand over personal information about American users or even push fake news.

“We will continue to brief members of Congress on the plans that have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies—plans that we are well underway in implementing—to further secure our platform in the United States,” McQuaide added.

TikTok has insisted it maintains robust security controls on its data and that it prioritizes user privacy. Since the beginning of the year, it has taken steps to restrict US user data from other areas of its business, both technologically and organizationally. But earlier this year, it acknowledged that China-based employees can access TikTok user data and declined to commit to cutting off those data flows in general.

The U.S. Internet of Things is Not Enough: Parents Need to Know Before Choosing a Child’s Online Environment for Parental Concerns

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The evolving media landscape is chronicled in the daily digest.

But its widespread usage across the U.S. is alarming government officials. In November, FBI Director Christopher Wray raised eyebrows after he told lawmakers that the app could be used to control users’ devices.

The Senate bill would allow for exceptions for law enforcement, national security interests and activities.

The strongest argument to date is drawing on the creator user base of TikTok. It may be too little too late for some lawmakers with security concerns.

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’s life is affected by all manner of online content. This week’s Supreme Court case shows how vulnerable young people can belured into radicalism or self harm through online content. Parents might want to know if their child is becoming increasingly drawn toward figures who share racist or misogynistic views online.

TikTok: Why Instagram Has Not Removed Metrics on Suicide, Eating Disorder Recovery, or Self-Harm, or Pro-Eating Disorder Topics

The study paints a different picture of the viewing experience on the platform, as it includes a small sample size, a limited 30-minute window for testing, and the way accounts scrolled past a series of unrelated topics.

TikTok said it does not allow content depicting, promoting, normalizing, or glorifying activities that could lead to suicide or self-harm. Of the videos removed for violating its policies on suicide and self-harm content from April to June of this year, 93.4% were removed at zero views, 91.5% were removed within 24 hours of being posted and 97.1% were removed before any reports, according to the company.

The source said the CCDH does not differentiate between positive and negative videos on eating disorder recovery topics.

This isn’t the first time social media algorithms have been tested. In October 2021, US Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s staff registered an Instagram account as a 13-year-old girl and proceeded to follow some dieting and pro-eating disorder accounts (the latter of which are supposed to be banned by Instagram). The senator told CNN at the time that the young account should follow more extreme dieting accounts, and that the Algorithm had begun almost exclusively to recommend the young account.

When someone searches for banned words, they will not see any results and instead will be directed to local support resources.

Lobbying for the Tech-Focused Bounds: The Case of TikTok, Meta, Amazon, Google, and App Stores

There was a call with 30 TikTok creators on March 10, two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine. The White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki briefed the creators, who had tens of million of followers, on the latest news from the conflict and the priorities of the White House. During the previous summer, the White House recruited hundreds of TikTokers to encourage people to get vaccine against Covid.

Lobbying has made some of the bills hard to pass. It is difficult to impose sweeping regulations on an entire industry when you have to look at how the US government handles its own technology.

The tech industry’s largest players have faced a kitchen sink of allegations in recent years. Big Tech has been found to be one of Washington’s largest villains, due to a number of reasons.

“We think a lot of the concerns are maybe overblown,” Beckerman told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday, “but we do think these problems can be solved” through the ongoing government negotiations.

ByteDance had 17 lobbyists and spent $270,000 on lobbying in the last year, according to public records. By the end of last year, its lobbyist count had more than doubled and the company had spent nearly $5.2 million on lobbying.

Meta was the biggest internet industry lobbying giant last year, spending upward of $20 million. Amazon was at $19 million, followed by Google at almost $10 million. It takes roughly $47 million to lobby, more than double what was spent by TikTok’s parent.

For much of this year, supporters of AICOA insisted that the legislation had enough votes to pass, however they called on the Senate to bring it to a floor vote. The bill never got to the floor time its supporters wanted as a result of intense tech lobbying and doubts about whether it had the votes. The same fate awaited other tech-focused antitrust bills, such as one that would have forced Apple to allow users to download iPhone apps from any website, not just its own app store.

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 the bill could have dire consequences if passed, and it dropped news content on its platforms.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/washington-tiktok-big-tech/index.html

How Academics Can I Learn to Teach? The Case of Silicon Valley Tech Giants in a High-Dimensional Tech Environment

Silicon Valley’s biggest players have skillfully defended their turf in Washington, fighting to stay in their places of business.

By contrast, the rules government may impose on tech platforms have raised doubts about how they will affect the economy from small businesses to individual users of the internet.

While federal law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — helps protect online companies from liability arising from what third-party users post on their platforms, the lawsuit argues that provision does not protect the tech giants’ behavior in this case.

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 staples in academia and higher education curriculums. The app has fundamentally changed the nature of modern communication with its aesthetics, practices, storytelling, and information-sharing.

How are media professors supposed to train their students to be savvy content creators and consumers if they can’t teach a pillar of the modern media landscape? While students can still see TikTok in their own homes, professors can no longer show TikTok to students via powerpoint or classroom web browser. 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. The world will be more accessible as students can see the things they are learning in real time.

The world is turning as the countries implement their bans, leaving them disadvantaged in a fast-paced media world. In addition, peers from other states will be able to receive education and training which will make it more difficult for media and communications students in the States to apply for jobs.

Professors work on research too. 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 that the bans only apply on campus, who is going to pay for the more expensive data plan on their phone? The answer is not one. While working at home does remain an option, professors are also employees who are expected to be on campus regularly to show they are in fact working. 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.

While hundreds of families are pursuing lawsuits against the companies over harms they allege their children have suffered from social media, it’s not clear if any other school districts have filed a complaint like Seattle’s.

They blame them for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders, making it more difficult to educate students, and forcing schools to take steps such as training teachers about social media and hiring more mental health professionals.

The complaint said that the defendants have exploited the vulnerable brains of young people, hooking hundreds of millions of students into positive feedback loops on social media. “Worse, the content Defendants curate and direct to youth is too often harmful and exploitive ….”

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.

TikTok: Protecting Big Tech and Bringing It to the Deliberative Judicies of the U.S. House of Representatives

The entire TikTok team has a special message for their community, and it was shared by the CEO, who is in Congress later this week.

“We’ve made our concerns clear with 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.

The app is owned by ByteDance, Inc., which has been under fire since the Trump administration signed an executive order to ban the app.

It’s time for Congress to finally pass a comprehensive privacy law. With state privacy laws popping up across the US, creating chaos for American companies without addressing some fundamental issues, now is the time for Congress and President Biden to create predictable rules and take back leadership in tech regulation. Congress can clearly define the kind of critical data that can be stored in the US, in our democratic allies, in neutral countries and in our adversaries.

Last night, if you talk to the US House Republicans, they will hear an offensive,partisan rant from the President. 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!”

The Republicans who control the gavels, TVs, thermostats, and magnetometers in the US House of Representatives decided to keep their rowdy ways away from Biden when he spoke of Silicon Valley.

Social Media and Data Privacy: Cory Booker, Tina Smith, and Other Brain-Induced Phenomenology Experts

Data privacy—a bipartisan concern that’s historically devolved into partisan squabbling and inaction at the end of each congressional session—owned the night. A popular line in a speech is that the US will have a privacy law someday.

New Jersey Democrat senator Cory Booker says that people on both sides of the aisle stand up is a good sign. The data we are seeing has a negative impact on their well-being, as well as on their self-esteem. So I think he is right, as the leader of our nation, to express and sound alarms of concern.”

The status quo has become harder in recent years, with conservatives concerned with “censorship” or liberals afraid of law enforcement in the post-rood v. Wade reality.

Yeah. Senator Tina Smith is from Minnesota and she says it is a big deal. We don’t really know or understand the impact of social media on kids. There is lots of evidence that it is dangerous, according to the child psychologists and experts I talk to.

Why is Social Media a Threat to Young People’s Mental Health? And What Does Social Media Offer Us About Self-Interaction and Self-Governance?

There are a lot of statistics. In the past year, nearly 1 in 3 teen girls reports seriously considering suicide. A majority of teens who are identified with the LGBTQ+ community say they attempted suicide in that time. Depression rates for all teens doubled over the course of a decade. The COVID-19 pandemic was occurring before that. Why right now?

“Our brains, our bodies, and our society have been evolving together to shape human development for millennia… Within the last twenty years, the advent of portable technology and social media platforms is changing what took 60,000 years to evolve,” Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association (APA), told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. “We are just beginning to understand how this may impact youth development.”

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’ve distilled it down to 10 useful pearls of wisdom for busy parents and caregivers.

Humans learn through interacting with others. In fact, said Prinstein, “numerous studies have revealed that children’s interactions with peers have enduring effects on their occupational status, salary, relationship success, emotional development, mental health, and even on physical health and mortality over 40 years later. These effects are stronger than those of children’s IQ, socioeconomic status, and educational attainment.

This helps explain the rapid growth of social media platforms. 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 provide important support to young people in times of stress and offer opportunities for interaction with a diverse peer group.

Prinstein said, when teens viewed these same illegal and/or dangerous behaviors on social media alongside icons suggesting they’d been “liked” by others, the part of the brain that keeps us safe stopped working as well, “suggesting that the ‘likes’ may reduce youths’ inhibition (i.e., perhaps increasing their proclivity) towards dangerous and illegal behavior.”

“Research indicates that this content has proliferated on social media sites, not only depicting these behaviors, but teaching young people how to engage in each, how to conceal these behaviors from adults, actively encouraging users to engage in these behaviors, and socially sanctioning those who express a desire for less risky behavior.”

According to research, adolescents’ brains were shown to be healthy when exposed to illegal, dangerous imagery on a fake social media site.

It is not unusual for harassment and discrimination against minorities to be online and often targeted at young people. There is a heightened amount of self-injury and threats on social media for the queer youth.

And online bullying can take a terrible physical toll, Prinstein said: “Brain scans of adults and youths reveal that online harassment activates the same regions of the brain that respond to physical pain and trigger a cascade of reactions that replicate physical assault and create physical and mental health damage.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “youth who report any involvement with bullying behavior are more likely to report high levels of suicide-related behavior than youth who do not report any involvement with bullying behavior.”

The suicide of a 14-year-old New Jersey girl came after a video of her being attacked by other students was posted on social media.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1157180971/10-things-to-know-about-how-social-media-affects-teens-brains

What we do when we look at social media: What do we really do? How do we use social media to manipulate our peers, their families, and ourselves?

Even adults feel it. We compare ourselves to everyone else on social media, from the sunsets in our vacation pics to our midsections, based on who is getting “likes” and who is not. For teens, the impacts of such comparisons can be amplified.

Exposure to online content is linked with lower self-esteem and distorted body perceptions among young people. This exposure creates strong risk factors for eating disorders, unhealthy weight-management behaviors, and depression,” Prinstein testified.

A study shows that screen time is keeping adolescents from getting the sleep they need. Not only is poor sleep linked to all sorts of downsides, including poor mental health symptoms, poor performance in school and trouble regulating stress, “inconsistent sleep schedules are associated with changes in structural brain development in adolescent years. Youngsters’ use of technology and social media may have an effect on their brain size.

What would make you not weaponize data if you were willing to fly a balloon over continental airspace and have people see it? Or use an app that’s on the phone of 60 million Americans to drive narratives in society that try to influence political debate in this country?” says Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida.

Even the most minuscule items add up to providing them with more data since they are trying to collect as much data as they can. “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.”

The senator told congressional reporters that the efforts offered by Chew were not relevant to his concerns.

How much is too much? When a student discovered social media, he took a risk and did it quit – A story of Jerome Yankey

How much is too much? Sometimes it is not easy to know. But sometimes, the answer is much more obvious. It was for Jerome Yankey. He was a college freshman when he noticed that his use of social media, specifically TikTok, had become problematic.

I think it was when I was scrolling all day long that it began to wear on me physically, because it was taking hours from my day. He said that he wasn’t doing much else in his free time.

When the toll shifted from physical to mental, quashing his creativity and warping his sense of worth, he decided he needed to quit. He did it cold turkey and it was not easy.

There are many people likeYankey. The 2022 Pew Research Survey of US teens found that 67% of them use TikTok, and among those, 16% use it “almost constantly.” The number of teens who use it is close to the number who don’t.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/24/health/screen-time-gupta-podcast-wellness/index.html

What do addicts think about addiction? A counterintuitive approach to helping them cope with their problems, including anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder

For now, internet addiction is not an official clinical diagnosis. There are still a lot of questions about whether it qualifies as a mental health disorder on its own or whether it should be considered part of another mental health condition. There are many questions about how to measure, test, and treat it.

Even if you’re not addicted to screen time, it is still a bad idea to spend too much time on it.

Rich also doesn’t think technology is the cause of his patients’ problems, but rather, it amplifies them. And he has a counterintuitive approach to helping his young patients, who are often coping with other issues – like anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder or just plain old stress. Listen to how they learn how to wean themselves off their devices and adopt a healthier relationship with their electronics.

When their day-to-day functions are impaired, the problem comes in. They are not getting enough sleep. They’re over eating. They are missing school or falling asleep in school. They are withdrawing from their friends.”

We as a society use the term addiction as a way to describe it. He said that we approach addiction as punishment rather than healing and that we thought of addicts as weak people with weak character.

Moms, Dads, and Me: Do We Really Need to Protect Kids Online? The Case of the Kids Online Safety Act (Kosa)

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 is also a former senior policy adviser to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee. You can follow him on the social networking site. The views expressed in this piece are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

The political debates over how much speech protections online cover Big Tech firms have inflamed the right for years. The justices seemed unsure about how to proceed with the complex issues at hand.

The battles over Big Tech and accusations of algorithmic bias may be what gets the Republican base riled up. But in a divided Congress, both parties should listen to the parents who make up their base – giving families more tools to protect their kids online is not only long overdue, it’s a political winner.

This issue is something that nearly every parent has to navigate. A recent report from Common Sense Media found that the average age of first exposure to pornography is now 12, and that three-quarters of teens had seen porn online by age 17.

A bipartisan effort to take modest steps to protect kids online might bear fruit. The Kids Online Safety Act (Kosa) would update the framework for how tech companies serve kids online and is being pushed by Republican and Democrat senators.

Civil rights and gay rights groups were against the bill, fearing it would prevent kids from accessing sexual education without their parents knowing. 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.

Some say parents should be the ultimate gatekeeper of their kids online, which is true. 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 there is a mass of families who agree to move social life offline, it will be the adolescents who will be missing out.

Indeed, some say the Blackburn-Blumenthal framework doesn’t go far enough. In our recent report, policy solutions that were more aggressive than those included in KOSA received support from three in four parents.

The Byte Dance App Cannot be Used on Android Devices Without a User’s Constraints. Addressing Online Abuse via Social Media

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 can’t be used on devices and that contracts need to be canceled that necessitate the app’s use.

US officials worry that the Chinese government could try to get Byte Dance to give them access to user data that could be used for espionage or propaganda. Independent security experts have previously stated that this type of access is a possibility, though there has been no reported incident of it to date.

The European Commission stopped the app on official devices last week due to concerns over cybersecurity, and Canada will follow suit as soon as Tuesday.

There is not a single moment when the abuse occurs because there isn’t one position that sparks a flurry of attacks. But much of the conversation around online abuse—and, more critically, the tools we have to address it—focuses on what we call the acute cases. Acute abuse is often a response to a debate, a position, or an idea: a polarizing tweet, a new book or article, some public statement. Acute abuse eventually dies down.

Platforms have resources to help address abuse. Users that are under attack can block individuals from being on the platform, as well as shielding them from offending content, which they do not want to see. They can use closed messages or private accounts to limit the amount of interaction they have with people outside their networks. There are third-party applications that try to address the gap by muting content.

Analyzing Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse Through Social Media and Bots: A Senator’s Perspective on Digital Banking and the Intelligence Committee

Kaine, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is one in a bipartisan group of US senators who are demanding briefings from intelligence officials and tech experts. Legislators fear that US financial institutions could be at risk from social-media-generated bank runs and that malicious actors could use misinformation andbots to create chaos in the financial system.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed earlier in March after it became clear it had made a bad bet on long-dated government debt, which meant it no longer had enough capital to comfortably pay back depositors. Some analysts and politicians think that the bank’s demise was caused by the spread of rumors on Facebook and other social media platforms by many of its customers.

While walking onto the Senate floor, he said that he was nervous and that he wouldn’t want a lot of people at the Capitol to hear him. I am 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.

The members of the Intelligence Committee have received a lot of information about the potential for manipulating US markets with deepfakes.

“Our competitors use social media to enhance and multiply any fear that’s put in the minds of Americans,” says South Dakota Republican Mike Rounds. They’re good at it. They use a system of bots that can distort fears and legitimate concerns.

Docuseries on Silicon Valley Startups and the Rise of TikTok: Stories of Small Business Owners, Creators, and Influencers

TikTok has 7,000 American employees, which is less than the 10,000 or more it would like to have 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.

Chew, a Singaporean who has largely stayed out of the spotlight since taking over TikTok in 2021, recently sat for interviews with multiple US newspapers and this week showed up in a video on the corporate TikTok account to highlight the vast reach of the app, which he revealed now has more than 150 million users in the United States.

A press conference is planned for Wednesday with dozens of social media creators on the steps of the Capitol, some of whom have been flown out there by TikTok. The company is paying for ad space in the Beltway. The docuseries highlighted small business owners who rely on the platform for their livelihoods.

TikTok has invited researchers and academics to its Washington DC offices to learn more about how it is working to address lawmakers concerns over its connections to China through its parent company, ByteDance. According to data tracked by OpenSecrets, the parent company spent more than $5 million last year on lobbying.

The series spotlighted inspiring stories of American small business owners and creators. The first 60-second video shows a Mississippi soap maker who built her business on the app, and the second shows an ex-worker who quit his job to share educational videos on TikTok to teach toddlers how to read.

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. The creators have a lot of followers on TikTok.

Wechat: Connecting Social Media and Ecommerce in the United States, and the Case of the TikTok App Across the Diaspora

Sherman doubted that the PR push will be as successful as it might be due to the current state of Washington.

“It’s gotten a lot more attention, so there’s just more awareness of the problem,” says Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the top Democrat on the new House Select Committee on China.

TikTok is part of the U.S. culture. A trip to Trader Joe’s may include an “as seen on TikTok” section, which features foods that are popular on TikTok. Or, for example, Barnes & Noble stores, with tables dedicated to #BookTok. 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, 38, works in project management and is unsure if he should use the app because it is heavily censored in China. The Wechat users outside of China were informed last year that their personal data, such as likes, comments, and search history, would be transmitted back to the People’s Republic. But Zhou says he’s willing to make the tradeoff between privacy and staying connected to his parents. It is easy for us to move on to another app for my generation. For those who are not tech savvy, it is hard for them to move to another application.

WeChat is often referred to as a messaging app, but it’s far more than that. It integrates social media and ecommerce features, creating a platform where it’s relatively easy to build businesses and communities. 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.

Alex Stamos: A Stanford Professor in the 21st Century and the New Coalition of Autocracies: The Case of the U.S.

Editor’s Note: Alex Stamos is a founding partner of the Krebs Stamos Group as well as the founder and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Alex was the chief information security officer for Yahoo before launching KSG and the SIO. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

We are now at the beginning of a long fight between the world’s democracies and a new coalition of autocracies led by the Chinese Communist Party who have emerged from the Covid-19 crisis with the most authoritarian leader of the 21st century.

The Chinese leader helped to accentuate its new role by publicly endorsing the International Criminal Court case against Putin, who was indicted for war crimes last week. China continues to push boundaries and prepare for potential conflicts with its neighbors and the West in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.

Unrest in Hong Kong and the embarrassing emergence of Covid-19 from Wuhan has motivated China to rapidly improve its surveillance, influence and control around the world. This investment has paid off, and many observers, including our team at Stanford, consider China to be the world’s leader in this area.

Beijing and Moscow-based employees of social media companies in the US have access to the personal information of US citizens on their services, but there is no law governing the access in the US. And, there is currently no federal law discouraging the overcollection of critical data or personally identifiable information.

Congress can make it legal for civil society and academic researchers to have access to the contents of social networks. These groups help American social media companies find and analyze campaigns to manipulate both global and American politics, by helping citizens and journalists of the kinds of campaigns that may target them.

The US and our allies need to do a lot more in the information war, which involves protecting journalists who are able to operate independently of any government, as well as supporting civil societies that create public resistance against the Chinese censorship that is invading countries such as Turkey.

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. The history of the rest of the 21st century depends on it.

He diligently opened the packet of notes while he was before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Many of the lawmakers that would be questioning him had already decided to question him about the app, and the sheet in the packet seemed to have their names and faces on it.

Data Privacy in Social Media: Why Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Fail to the FTC, and Why Foreign-owned Social Media Companies Have a Bad Record

Chair McMorris-Rodgers told her opening statement that her platform should be banned. “I expect today you’ll say anything to avoid this outcome.”

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.

It was not lost on Chew that American companies have made similar mistakes before. There isn’t a good record of data privacy and user security by American social companies. “Just look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, for one example.”

In Cambridge Analytica’s case, Facebook settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $5 billion. The legislative debate was sparked by the scandal. Years later, Congress has yet to approve any meaningful data protections governing US or foreign-owned social media companies.

The Impact of a Social Media TikTok Ban on Popular Content Creators and Video-Streaming Services, including Snap, Instagram, and YouTube

Many social media companies have spent a long time copying TikTok features, which would help them shift away from the platform. In 2020 the social network introduced a short-form video tool called Reels. Snapchat has Spotlight, YouTube has Shorts and even Spotify has a TikTok-like video feed with recommended music and other content.

“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.

Even if the ban isn’t enacted, it could still benefit these companies. “This uncertainty could push some TikTok content creators to focus more on, and possibly begin, pushing their audiences to other social network platforms,” Mogharabi said.

At least one company is already seeing a boost. Snap’s stock rose in the days leading up to TikTok’s appearance before Congress amid renewed talks among federal officials of a TikTok ban.

“Most users will flock to where the content creators go next,” Su said. Content creators will still prefer places where they can monetize their content, which is why places likeInstagram,Snapchat, and Youtube shorts are the ones to benefit from.

Smaller platforms have the opportunity to gain ground, too, Su said. Triller, with 450 million users, is courting popular content creators from TikTok with cash bonuses, partnerships and other incentives to switch platforms. Dubsmach, which is owned by Reddit and allows people to create short videos, is a platform that could be attractive to creators.

“I strongly doubt this app will go dark,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi told CNN during a primetime special about TikTok on Thursday. A sale is the most likely outcome, he said.

It is possible that a more trusted US TikTok will make it more difficult for users to move to TikTok in the future.

How Do U.S. Cyber Crimes End? The Case of TikTok and the Canadian CFO and Daughter of Alibaba’s Jack Ma

China’s reach in this regard is wide, and its ability to exert influence is powerful. China retaliated by arresting two Canadians and sentencing a third to death after Canada arrested the CFO and daughter of the company’s founder. While you are associated with the government, they could put a lot of pressure on any firm that does business in China to turn in data and spy on other countries.

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).

The hearing was a weird, brutal, xenophobia mess due to their obsession with communism, their condescending tone, and an assumption that Chew was Chinese despite his reminders. Users on TikTok paid attention.

They weren’t fans. The app has flooded with videos mocking Congress and supporting Tik Tok, as well as pointing out the abuse of data and Algorithms by it, and it could very well be boosting TikTok. I don’t think that TikTok is inciting a genocide like Meta has.

I don’t think the plan to get people to reconsider using TikTok was a success. Not if all our FYP feeds are reliable.

“Without legally mandated safety by design, transparency, and accountability, the algorithm will continue to put vulnerable users at risk,” Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said in a press statement. “Congress owes it to America’s parents today to get answers.”

The students at Denver’s East High School ran from their classrooms during the last school shooting. The free school lunch program expired this year, reverting to an income-based system that will make it more difficult for children who need it the most. Nearly one-third of children in the US live in poverty, largely thanks to deeply entrenched issues of economic inequality and an eroding social safety net.