Trump reiterated his concerns as lawmakers weigh a bill this week that would give TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to divest the short video app used by 170 million Americans.

The US House of Representatives is set to vote on Wednesday under fast-track rules that require two-thirds of members to vote “yes” for the measure to win passage.

TikTok told Congress late Monday in a letter seen by Reuters it is “not owned or controlled by the Chinese government” and argued if the company was sold another buyer would not continue TikTok’s $1.5 billion effort to protect US data.

“Ironically, US user data could be less secure under a divestment scheme,” the company said.

The FBI, Justice Department, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence plan to hold on Tuesday a classified briefing for House members, two sources said. FBI Director Chris Wray reiterated concerns about TikTok at a hearing on Monday.

The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community released on Monday said “TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the US midterm election cycle in 2022.”

The Justice Department detailed its security concerns about TikTok in a document last week first reported by Reuters.

“I’m not looking to make Facebook double the size,” Trump told CNBC on Monday. “And if you if you ban TikTok, (then) Facebook and others, but mostly Facebook, will be a big beneficiary. And I think Facebook has been very dishonest.”

Trump met recently with investor Jeff Yass, whose investment firm Susquehanna International Group has a stake in ByteDance, he confirmed on CNBC. Trump said they did not talk about TikTok.

Meta Platforms shares closed down 4.4% at $483.59 on Monday. The company declined to comment.

‘Kids will go crazy’

Trump previously criticized the company now called Meta Platforms for revoking his access to Facebook and Instagram after removing two of his posts during the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. His accounts were reinstated in February 2023.

Trump also said a TikTok ban could impact young people. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it,” he said. “There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok.”

Tiktok CEO Shou Zi Chew will visit Capitol Hill later this week on a previously scheduled trip to talk to senators, a source briefed on the matter said.

President Joe Biden said last week he would sign the bill after a committee unanimously approved the measure.

TikTok, which says it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government, argues the House bill amounts to a ban. It is unclear if China would approve any sale or if TikTok could be divested in six months.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said “we must ensure the Chinese government cannot weaponize TikTok against American users and our government through data collection and propaganda.”

The bill would give ByteDance 165 days to divest TikTok. If it failed to do so, app stores operated by Apple, Alphabet’s Google and others could not legally offer TikTok or provide Web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.

In 2020, Trump sought to ban TikTok and Chinese-owned WeChat but was blocked by the courts.

The app is popular and getting legislation approved by both the House and Senate in an election year may be difficult. Last month, Biden’s re-election campaign joined TikTok.

Trump’s campaign has not joined TikTok. – Rappler.com

Play Video

The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters, alongside Getty Images, released kill notifications, or instructions for retracting the photo, which was released by Kensington Palace on Sunday, March 10.

The image came alongside her first public message since undergoing abdominal surgery in January.

According to the Associated Press’ kill notification shared by Chris Ship of ITV News, “at closer inspection it appears the source has manipulated the image.”

The Associated Press added in a report, “The photo shows an inconsistency in the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand.” 

In a social media post on March 11, Middleton, who also goes by Catherine, apologized for “any confusion” caused by the photograph posting.

The post, bearing her initial C, said, “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day.”

The BBC earlier reported the image of Middleton and her children – Prince George, Prince Louis, and Princess Charlotte – was taken by Prince William, and is the first official photo released of her since she was last publicly seen on December 25.

News organizations hold strict guidelines on the usage of manipulated photographs, such as adding notices if a photograph has been altered or changed from its original, or allowing only minor touch-ups for quality or image visibility purposes, depending on the organization. – Rappler.com

News publishers and governments like Australia have argued that Facebook and Google unfairly benefit in terms of advertising revenue when links to news articles appear on their platforms. Meta has been scaling back its promotion of news and political content to drive traffic and says news links are now a fraction of users’ feeds.

Meta will discontinue a tab on Facebook which promotes news in Australia and the United States, it said in a statement, adding that it cancelled the news tab last year in the UK, France, and Germany.

As a result, “we will not enter into new commercial deals for traditional news content in these countries and will not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers,” the statement added.

The decision pits Meta against the Australian government and its 2021 law.

“The idea that one company can profit from others’ investment, not just investment in capital but investment in people, investment in journalism, is unfair,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters.

“That’s not the Australian way,” he added.

The government is seeking advice from the Treasury Department and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) about its next steps.

Rod Sims, the former ACCC chair who oversaw the design of the law, called Meta’s reversal selfish and he was concerned about the impact on society as the decision undermined the quality of journalism which appears on social media.

“This is Meta thumbing its nose at the Australian parliament,” he said.

Under the 2021 law, the country’s government must decide whether it will appoint a mediator to set Meta’s fees and potentially fine Meta if it fails to cooperate. Most of Meta’s deals with Australian media ran for three years and are set to expire in 2024.

Meta is, however, not obligated to pay news publishers if it blocks users from reposting news articles as it did briefly in 2021. It has done the same in Canada since 2023 when the country passed similar laws. Meta said on Friday, March 1, that publishers could continue posting news content on Facebook.

Tama Leaver, an internet studies professor at Curtin University, said Meta will be reluctant to escalate the dispute by stopping its users from posting news links in Australia and will more likely challenge the government in court if it intervenes.

“Meta is going ‘what are you going to do?’ and the Australian government has a real decision to make,” he said.

Australia’s biggest media outlets lambasted the decision, calling it an attack on the industry.

“Meta is using its immense market power to refuse to negotiate, and the government is right to explore every option for how the Media Bargaining Code’s powers can be used,” said News Corp Australasia Executive Chairman Michael Miller.

Nine Entertainment CEO Mike Sneesby said the decision failed to acknowledge the value that the media firm, which owns the Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review mastheads and a free-to-air television channel, created for Meta.

While no deal values have been disclosed, Australian media outlets have reported Facebook’s deals are worth A$70 million ($45 million) a year to the industry.

Google’s Australian media licencing deals mostly ran for five years, expiring in 2026. A spokesperson said the company has already started negotiations for deal renewals.

Many governments around the world remain keen on protecting their local news industries from being elbowed out of the online advertising market. Indonesia said last month it also plans to make large tech firms pay for news content. – Rappler.com

The complaints by the consumer groups in the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Greece, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain to data protection authorities in their countries are the latest grievances against Meta’s trove of user data.

The consumer bodies said Meta is not complying with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules on fair processing, data minimization and purpose limitation and that there was no legal basis to the company’s data collection and processing.

“Surveillance-based business models pose all kinds of problems under the GDPR and it’s time for data protection authorities to stop Meta’s unfair data processing and its infringing of people’s fundamental rights,” Ursula Pachl, deputy director general of the European Consumer Organization said in a statement.

She also criticized Meta’s recent launch of paid, ad-free subscriptions to Facebook and Instagram in Europe, which the company said aims to comply with new EU tech rules.

But critics say this amounts to users having to pay for their privacy. Users who do not mind ads can continue to use the two services for free.

“Meta’s offer to consumers is smoke and mirrors to cover up what is, at its core, the same old hoovering up of all kinds of sensitive information about people’s lives which it then monetizes through its invasive advertising model,” Pachl said.

Meta has said subscription for no ads addresses the latest regulatory developments, guidance and judgments shared by European regulators and the courts in recent years. – Rappler.com

The platform said the video had violated their policies on harassment and cyberbullying. It later republished an edited version without the reporter’s private information.

In response, Lopez Obrador accused the platform of censorship and said it was acting with an overbearing and authoritarian attitude.

The message was accompanied by a picture of the Statue of Liberty, which he said had become a “empty symbol.” YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Thursday, Lopez Obrador read aloud a letter from the Times requesting comment on a story reporters were preparing about a shelved US government investigation into allegations that his allies met with and took millions of dollars from drug cartels after he took office in 2018.

Then he read the phone number of Times’ bureau chief. The same day, Mexico’s freedom of information body INAI said it was initiating an investigation into his revealing the number.

After the news conference, the Times issued a statement that called it “a troubling and unacceptable tactic from a world leader.”

Making public a journalist’s private phone number is particularly worrisome in Mexico, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for reporters outside of war zones, especially for Mexican journalists investigating criminal gangs and widespread corruption.

Lopez Obrador frequently attacks the news media during his daily press conferences.

“She is slandering us and if she is very worried, then she should change her phone number,” Lopez Obrador told reporters after the video was released. “Above the personal data protection law, there is the dignity of the president.”

In the days that followed, social media users published the private numbers of one of Lopez Obrador’s sons and both candidates for the country’s June presidential race, Claudia Sheinbaum from the president’s MORENA party and rival Xochitl Galvez.

Galvez said that she had gotten a flood of messages since her number was published – both critical and supporting – and that she would not change it.

MORENA’s New York committee protested outside the Times’ office in New York City on Sunday afternoon.

The New York Times story in question, published just after Lopez Obrador revealed the reporter’s phone number, noted that the United States never opened a formal investigation and that officials ultimately shelved the inquiry.

Lopez Obrador denied all accusations and said it was “completely false.”

That story came on the heels of other recent reporting from other media outlets about a different US investigation into possible collusion between a drug cartel and Lopez Obrador associates to accept money for his 2006 presidential campaign in exchange for leniency.

Lopez Obrador has denied those accusations, calling them slander, and responded by saying the journalist who broke the story was a “mercenary in the service” of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which carried out the investigation.

Concerns about media safety have remained consistent throughout Lopez Obrador’s presidency. In January, the theft of the personal data of hundreds of journalists in Mexico, including addresses and copies of voter ID cards and passports, raised fresh worries.

International free-speech organization Article 19 has documented 163 journalist murders in Mexico since 2000. – Rappler.com

“Today, deepfakes often involve sexual imagery, fraud, or political disinformation. Since AI is progressing rapidly and making deepfakes much easier to create, safeguards are needed,” the group said in the letter, which was put together by Andrew Critch, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley.

Deepfakes are realistic yet fabricated images, audios and videos created by AI algorithms, and recent advances in the technology have made them more and more indistinguishable from human-created content.

The letter, titled “Disrupting the Deepfake Supply Chain,” makes recommendations on how to regulate deepfakes, including full criminalization of deepfake child pornography, criminal penalties for any individual knowingly creating or facilitating the spread of harmful deepfakes, and requiring AI companies to prevent their products from creating harmful deepfakes.

As of Wednesday morning, over 400 individuals from various industries including academia, entertainment and politics had signed the letter.

Signatories included Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, two former Estonian presidents, researchers at Google DeepMind and a researcher from OpenAI.

Ensuring AI systems do not harm society has been a priority for regulators since Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT in late 2022, which wowed users by engaging them in human-like conversation and performing other tasks.

There have been multiple warnings from prominent individuals about AI risks, notably a letter signed by Elon Musk last year that called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model. – Rappler.com

According to the report, half of all Filipino users aged 16 to 24 watch vlogs or influencer videos per week at 50.7%, the highest in the world and more than twice the global average. Next to Filipinos are users from Morocco where only 32% watch vlogs per week.

Almost half of all Filipino social media users also follow “influencers or other experts” in social media at 43.9%, the highest in the world, while the worldwide average is only 22.6%, the report said.

Filipino users aged 16 to 24 also kept their rank as fourth in terms of time spent on social media daily at 3 hours and 34 minutes, which is more than an hour longer than the world average at 2 hours and 23 minutes.

Deep love of videos, music

The report by Meltwater and We Are Social also looked at trends in online video consumption. They found that, among internet users in the Philippines aged 16 to 64, 97.2% watch any kind of online video each week, the highest in the world.

Comparatively, the worldwide average is at 92% and Mexico, the next closest country in terms of percentage, has 97% of users aged 16 to 64 watching online videos each week.

According to the report, Filipino internet users love to watch educational videos like how-to videos and tutorial videos, second only to South Africans worldwide. 58.3% of Filipino internet users watch educational videos each week compared to 60.8% of South African users.

Filipinos also reign supreme in watching online music videos. Almost three out of four Filipino internet users aged 16 to 24 watch online music videos each week at 72.7%, far ahead of the worldwide average at only 49.7%. Only 64.7% of internet users in Chile, the next country in terms of percentage, watch online music videos each week.

Two out of five Filipino users listen to music in online streaming services each year at 42.9%, ranking 15th worldwide. The Philippines is 10 percentage points behind South Africa which took the top spot with slightly more than half of the African country’s internet users streaming music at 52.2%.

Despite Filipinos’ interest in online music streaming services, only 22% of Filipino online music streaming users pay for the services, slightly lower than the world average at 22.5%. In comparison to the Philippines, 43.2% of online music streamers in Sweden pay for streaming music.

Dethroned in gaming

Indonesia dethrones the Philippines’ for being the country with the highest percentage of internet users who play video games. According to Digital 2024, 96.5% of Indonesian internet users aged 16-64 play video games on any device compared to 95.9% of Filipinos who play games.

Social media butterflies

The report also noted that internet users in the Philippines spend an average of 3 hours and 34 minutes using social media each day, ranking 4th in the world followed by users in Brazil (3 hours and 37 minutes), South Africa (3 hours and 41 minutes), and Kenya (3 hours and 43 minutes).

Philippine internet users also ranked fourth worldwide in terms of time in the internet used on social media at 40% next to Indonesia (41.7%), Mexico (42.5%), and Saudi Arabia (43.4%). 

Filipino internet users spend an average of 26 hours 54 minutes each month on Facebook, the 4th highest in the world next to users in Vietnam (26 hours and 54 minutes), the United Arab Emirates (29 hours and 48 minutes), and Egypt (33 hours and 59 minutes).

On TikTok, Filipinos are top 8 in terms of average time spent on the platform, at 40 hours and 46 minutes monthly, almost twice the monthly global average of 24 hours.

Unlike other social media platforms, Filipinos spend least time on Instagram and is only second to Vietnam in spending the least time on the platform at 3 hours and 41 mins compared to the worldwide average of 15 hours and 50 minutes each month.

The complete 561-slide Digital 2024 report, with insights on a host of various countries, is downloadable here. – Rappler.com

The campaign’s launch on TikTok is notable given that the app, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, is under review in the US for potential national security concerns. Some US lawmakers have long called for the app to be banned over concerns that the Chinese government could access user data or influence what people see on the app.

Last year, the Biden administration ordered government agencies to remove TikTok from federal government-owned phones and devices.

TikTok has maintained that it would not share US user data with the Chinese government and has taken substantial measures to protect the privacy of its users.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.

Biden campaign advisors said in a statement it would “continue meeting voters where they are,” including on other social media apps like Meta Platform’s Instagram and Truth Social, which is owned by former US President Donald Trump.

The campaign is taking “advanced safety precautions” for its devices and its presence on TikTok was separate from the app’s ongoing security review, a campaign official added.

Trump, the Republican frontrunner in the presidential race, does not have an official account on TikTok.

The video posted by the Biden-Harris HQ TikTok account made light of a fringe conservative conspiracy theory that the Super Bowl was rigged in favor of the Chiefs, in order for pop superstar Taylor Swift, who is dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, to announce an endorsement of Biden.

Amid rapid-fire questions asking the president to choose from one of two options, Biden was asked if he was “deviously plotting to rig the season so the Chiefs would win the Super Bowl” or whether the Chiefs were simply just a good football team.

“I’d get in trouble if I told you,” Biden joked.

By Sunday night, the account had gained 10,900 followers. – Rappler.com

Spread over websites in 30 countries, the propaganda material is interspersed with news aggregated from local news outlets and Chinese state media, according to a research report the Toronto-based group released on Wednesday.

“While the campaign’s websites enjoyed negligible exposure to date, there is a heightened risk of inadvertent amplification by the local media and target audiences, as a result of the quick multiplication of these websites and their adaptiveness to local languages and content,” researcher Alberto Fittarelli said in the report.

The sites’ content sways between conspiracy theories, often about the United States or its allies – such as a piece blaming American scientists for “leaking” COVID-19 – to articles attacking Beijing’s critics.

It is rare for researchers to link such operations to specific entities. Citizen Lab said the campaign began in mid-2020 and traced the network to public relations firm Shenzhen Haimaiyunxiang Media Co., Ltd., also known as Haimai.

The company did not respond to a Reuters request for comment and a phone number listed on an archived version of its website was not reachable.

“As a principle, it is a typical bias and double standard to allege that the pro-China contents and reports are ‘disinformation’, and to call the anti-China ones ‘true information,’” a spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington said in an emailed statement.

Citizen Lab said one of the websites in the campaign was Roma Journal, which looks every bit like a local Italian news outlet: headlines discuss the Italian prime minister’s political prospects, a hot air balloon festival in a northern province and a book launch.

But a “press releases” button at a corner of its homepage leads to a range of Chinese state media articles on topics such as China’s contribution to the global economic recovery and its push towards technological innovation.

Much of the content on the sites Citizen Lab found was sourced from a press releases service called Times Newswire, which analysts at cybersecurity firm Mandiant last year found to be at the center of a separate Chinese influence operation that targeted U.S. audiences.

While online influence campaigns are increasingly common as powerful people and governments around the world seek to manipulate public opinion, experts tracking such operations say China is one of the biggest sources of such drives alongside Russia and Iran.

Chinese influence operations have increased and expanded well beyond Asia, social media giant Meta said in a report in November, calling it “the most notable change in the threat landscape” since 2020.

Citizen Lab dug deeper into the network it found after a series of such websites popped up in South Korea and Italy.

South Korea’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) – part of the country’s national intelligence agency – exposed 18 of the sites in a report in November, also linking the operation to Haimai. Roma Journal was not legally registered as a news outlet in Italy, the country’s Il Foglio newspaper reported.

It was not unusual the campaign was found to be low-engagement, said Dakota Cary, a China-focused consultant at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne.

“I think that’s really important, because they still think that it’s worthwhile to fund these campaigns,” he said. “And so I think, if anything, we should expect to see this continue.” – Rappler.com

The board believes the current policy is “incoherent,” at least relative to the needs of the platform at present.

What was the video?

According to the February 2024 ruling by the Oversight Board, the board chose to uphold a decision – citing Meta’s existing policies – that would let an edited video of Biden remain on the site.

The original video from October 2022 showed Biden as he was voting in person during the US midterm elections. The original video showed him exchanging ‘I Voted” stickers with his adult granddaughter. He placed the sticker above her chest, according to the granddaughter’s instructions, and then kissed his granddaughter on the cheek.

The May 2023 video from a Facebook user loops the video in such a way as to emphasize when the president’s hand makes contact with his granddaughter’s chest, as if inappropriately touching her. This video’s caption calls Biden a “sick pedophile,” and adds those who vote for him are “mentally unwell.”

That video, the Oversight Board said, “was edited to make it appear as though US President Joe Biden is inappropriately touching his adult granddaughter’s chest, and which is accompanied by a caption describing him as a ‘pedophile.'”

‘Incoherent’ policy

The Oversight Board noted, “The Facebook post does not violate Meta’s Manipulated Media policy, which applies only to video created through artificial intelligence (AI) and only to content showing people saying things they did not say.”

The board added that, as the video in the post wasn’t altered using AI and showed Biden doing something he did not do – rather than say something he never said – it doesn’t violate existing Meta policy.

That said, the board said it was “concerned about the Manipulated Media policy in its current form, finding it to be incoherent, lacking in persuasive justification and inappropriately focused on how content has been created, rather than on which specific harms it aims to prevent (for example, to electoral processes),” It added Meta should reconsider its policy accordingly given the number of elections in 2024.

The Oversight Board’s recommendation

The Oversight Board held three recommendations regarding this case.

First, it recommended Meta reconsider the scope of its Manipulated Media policy, so that audio and audiovisual content were considered, and so that included in the scope was “content showing people doing things they did not do (as well as saying things they did not say) and content regardless of how it was created or altered.”

Second, the board recommended a single unified Manipulated Media policy that defines what harms the policy aims to prevent. Beyond misleading users of Meta’s services, the policy should also note other situations, such as what it called “preventing interference with the right to vote and to participate in the conduct of public affairs.”

Lastly, the board recommended labeling altered or misleading content rather than removing manipulated media when it has not made any other policy violation. Said the board, “Such a label should be attached to the media (for example, at the bottom of a video) rather than the entire post and be applied to all identical instances of that media on Meta’s platforms.” – Rappler.com