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As the U.S. government considers banning social media app TikTok, the U.S. music industry faces a few scenarios regarding the platform that’s become a lifeline for discovering and breaking artists — and most aren’t good.
The grilling of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday (March 23) had all the political theater expected from a Congressional hearing. It also had one important characteristic unusual for the United States in 2023: bi-partisan agreement. Despite Chew’s insistence that U.S. TikTok users’ data cannot be accessed from China, home of parent company Bytedance, neither Democrats nor Republicans seem intent on allowing TikTok to operate within their borders.
The showdown seemed inevitable given TikTok’s foreign entanglements and the app’s quick ascendence. The app accounted for 17% of total time spent on mobile apps globally in 2022, according to Data.ai — second behind WeChat’s 19.5% and well ahead of No. 3 YouTube’s 12.7%. Chew told lawmakers that TikTok has 150 million users in the U.S. That’s 50% more than the 100 million figure TikTok previously made public (and eMarketer’s latest estimate of 95.8 million at the end of 2022). Among U.S. Gen Z consumers aged 18 to 24, TikTok ranks No. 2 behind Instagram in monthly average users, according to Data.ai.
But the app’s fate in the United States “is on shakier ground than ever,” according to eMarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg. “TikTok’s decision to highlight how entrenched the app has become in US society was miscalculated,” Enberg said in a statement. “It actually strengthened U.S. lawmakers’ argument that TikTok poses a threat to both national security and young people.”
Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, agrees. The vocal TikTok critic told CBS News “the day could not have gone any worse for TikTok” and that Chew “completely failed” to gain “some level” of trust and credibility with members of Congress.
While a TikTok ban appears popular amongst politicians, not everybody is supportive. The Cato Institute’s Paul Matzo called a ban “a hamfisted mistake” born from “neo-Cold War paranoia.” It wouldn’t necessarily make America safer, he argued, and would amount to a bail-out for Meta, whose TikTok competitor, Instagram, has failed to win on a level playing field. The Brookings Institute’s Darrell M. West and Michaela Robison argue that a ban would open up U.S. companies in China — such as automaker Tesla — to similar scrutiny.
If a ban could withstand a legal challenge — former President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban TikTok and Chinese messaging app WeChat both failed — TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, would be forced to sell the company. President Joe Biden’s administration has encouraged Bytedance to sell TikTok. But it wouldn’t be a straightforward process. China would “strongly oppose” a forced sale, a Ministry of Commerce spokesperson said Thursday, and TikTok is subject to Chinese law on tech exports and would require government approval.
A prompt sale of TikTok, which is reportedly valued at $60 billion, would be the best outcome for the music industry in search of new sources of streaming revenue. TikTok’s revenue rocketed from $4 billion in 2021 to $10 billion in 2022, according to reports. Research firm Omdia projects that TikTok’s ad revenue will climb to $44 billion by 2027 — presumably assuming there are no geopolitical interferences — and surpass the combined video ad revenues of Meta and YouTube. Although TikTok is not a major source of revenue for labels and publishers, rights holders expect to eventually have licensing agreements that give them a share of advertising revenue for user-generated content (like their deal with YouTube).
The current hodgepodge of bans also hurts both TikTok and the music industry. In the United States, TikTok has already been banned by some federal agencies, state and local governments and universities. Elsewhere, TikTok has been banned from the official phones of staff of the European Commission, U.K. parliament, Canadian government, Belgian government, Danish Defense Ministry and Latvian Foreign Ministry, to name a few. Fewer TikTok apps installed on fewer smartphones is twice the punishment for an app that depends on user-generated content. Lower usage means fewer people creating and viewing videos.
Perhaps the biggest question is what would happen to TikTok under new ownership. If, say, Oracle owned a stake in TikTok, as was proposed during the Trump administration, would the app continue to have the same magical recommendation algorithm that has made TikTok so irresistible and its competitors unable to keep up? New ownership would eliminate restraints on TikTok’s revenue and user growth, but if the product suffers, the music industry would be handed a less effective promotional tool and a less valuable source of revenue. The only certainty in this TikTok controversy is that such unintended consequences are guaranteed.
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Source: NurPhoto / Getty / Twitter
Elon Musk’s mission to make Twitter hot garbage continues.
Twitter, well, Elon Musk’s version of the app is now “winding down” its “legacy verified program and is giving people until April 1 to subscribe to Twitter Blue or risk losing their blue checkmark.
The announcement of this is not new because Musk has been threatening to do this since he took ownership of the social media platform, saying since November that in the “coming months,” he would be snatching away “legacy” verification badges given to users under company’s old ownership. After all, he feels they were given out in a “corrupt and nonsensical” way.
Keep in mind Phony Stark benefited from the old verification process because it told people on the platform and those who followed him on purpose that his account was legit.
This could be an elaborate troll job using Twitter’s Verified account because the new rule takes effect on April 1, also April Fool’s Day. Musk loves “own the libs” on Twitter, and many changes he said were coming have yet to happen.
But, another tweet sourcing a report from a website called boing boing claims Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to hide their blue checkmark to avoid ridicule because they dare to subscribe to the service.
We Are Watching These Social Media Platforms Suffer A Slow, Painful Death
Twitter Blue subscribers get other handy features outside the blue checkmark, like posting longer videos and editing tweets. It’s sad to see how one of the best social media experiences has quickly become a dumpster fire that you might have to pay $8 bucks to use to its full extent.
Musk is not the only social media platform CEO pushing a pay-for-verification plan. Mark Zuckerberg just recently began something similar on Facebook and Instagram, and, of course, no one cares for it.
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Photo: NurPhoto / Getty
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Source: Allen Berezovsky / Getty / Soulja Boy
Remember when crypto was all the rage? Now celebs who were out here pushing them are getting in T R O U B L E.
The SEC is cracking down on celebrities nefariously pushing crypto on normal people. Lil Yachty, Soulja Boy, Ne-Yo, Akon, Jake Paul, Lindsey Lohan, Austin Mahone, and adult film actress Kendra Lust were all hit with charges by the SEC for illegally promoting cryptocurrency.
According to Pitchfork’s reporting, everyone has agreed to pay a fine of $400K in “disgorgement, interest, and penalties” to settle the charges without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings. Mahone and Soulja Boy have yet to pay the funds.
The SEC also charged crypto pusher Justin Sun and three of his companies—Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc. (formerly BitTorrent Inc.) for the unregistered offer and sale of Tronix and BitTorrent. Sun is also in trouble for allegedly violating federal securities laws by plotting a scheme to inflate Tronix’s trading volume artificially.
Sun allegedly duped investors into buying Tronix and BitTorrent by using celebrity influencers and throwing them money to promote what the company was offering while telling them not to spill the beans on how much they were receiving in compensation.
Per the SEC:
While we’re neutral about the technologies at issue, we’re anything but neutral when it comes to investor protection. As alleged in the complaint, Sun and others used an age-old playbook to mislead and harm investors by first offering securities without complying with registration and disclosure requirements and then manipulating the market for those very securities. At the same time, Sun paid celebrities with millions of social media followers to tout the unregistered offerings, while specifically directing that they not disclose their compensation. This is the very conduct that the federal securities laws were designed to protect against regardless of the labels Sun and others used.
These latest celebs join the likes of T.I. who the SEC hit with a charge in 2020 for pushing bootleg initial coin offerings from a company called FLiK. In 2018, Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled felt the SEC’s wrath, with the boxer coughing up over $600K and the music producer having to pay over $150K and agree to not “promote any securities, digital, or otherwise,” for multiple years.
Kim Kardashian also got in trouble for the crypto jig as well and had to come out of her pockets. It was fun, but the SEC is not playing anymore.
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Photo: Allen Berezovsky / Getty
The CEO of TikTok faced a grilling Thursday from a U.S. congressional committee in a rare public appearance where made his own case for why the hugely popular video-sharing app shouldn’t be banned.
Shou Zi Chew’s testimony came at a crucial time for the company, which has acquired 150 million American users but is under increasing pressure from U.S. officials. TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have been swept up in a wider geopolitical battle between Beijing and Washington over trade and technology.
“Mr. Chew, you are here because the American people need the truth about the threat TikTok poses to our national and personal security,” Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, said in her opening statement. “TikTok has repeatedly chosen a path for more control, more surveillance and more manipulation.”
Chew, a 40-year-old Singapore native, told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that TikTok prioritizes the safety of its young users and denied allegations that the app is a national security risk. He reiterated the company’s plan to protect U.S. user data by storing all such information on servers maintained and owned by the server giant Oracle.
“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said.
On Wednesday, the company sent dozens of popular TikTokers to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers to preserve the platform. It has also been putting up ads all over Washington that tout promises of securing users’ data and privacy and creating a safe platform for its young users.
TikTok has been dogged by claims that its Chinese ownership means user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government or that it could be used to promote narratives favorable to the country’s Communist leaders.
In a rare, bipartisan effort to reign in the power and influence of a major social media platform, Republican and Democratic lawmakers pressed Chew on a host of topics, ranging from TikTok’s content moderation practices, how the company plans to secure American data from Beijing, and that it admits spying on journalists.
Watch the Hearing Below:
In 2019, the Guardian had reported TikTok was instructing its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square and other images unfavorable to the Chinese government. The platform says it has since changed its moderation practices.
ByteDance admitted in December that it fired four employees last summer who accessed data on two journalists, as well as other people connected to them, while attempting to track down the source of a leaked report about the company.
For its part, TikTok has been trying to distance itself from its Chinese origins, saying that 60% percent of its parent company ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group. ByteDance was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs in Beijing in 2012. Responding to a Wall Street Journal report, China said it would oppose any U.S. attempts to force ByteDance to sell the app.
But Chew pushed back against the idea that TikTok’s ownership was an issue in itself.
“Trust is about actions we take. We have to earn that trust with decisions we make for our company and our products and potential security, privacy content, manipulation concerns raised about TikTok are really not unique to us” Chew said. “Ownership is not at the core of addressing these concerns.”
A U.S. ban on an app would be unprecedented and it’s unclear how the government would enforce it.
Experts say officials could try to force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, preventing new users from downloading it as well as preventing existing users from updating it, ultimately rendering it useless.
The U.S. could also block access to TikTok’s infrastructure and data, seize its domain names or force internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon to filter TikTok data traffic, said Ahmed Ghappour, a criminal law and computer security expert who teachers at Boston University School of Law.
But a tech savvy user could still get around restrictions by using a virtual private network to make it appear the user is in another country where it’s not blocked, he said.
To avoid a ban, TikTok has been trying to sell officials on a $1.5 billion plan called Project Texas, which routes all U.S. user data to domestic servers owned and maintained by software giant Oracle. Under the project, access to U.S. data is managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which employs 1,500 people, is run independently of ByteDance and would be monitored by outside observers.
As of October, all new U.S. user data was being stored inside the country. The company started deleting all historic U.S. user data from non-Oracle servers this month, in a process expected to be completed later this year, Chew said.
Generally, researchers have said TikTok behaves like other social media companies when it comes to data collection. In an analysis released in 2021, the University of Toronto’s nonprofit Citizen Lab found TikTok and Facebook collect similar amounts of user data valuable for advertisers.
To block such tracking, Congress, the White House, U.S. armed forces and more than half of U.S. states have banned the use of the app from official devices.
But wiping away all the data tracking associated with the platform might prove to be difficult. In a report released this month, the Cybersecurity company Feroot said so-called tracking pixels from ByteDance, which collect user information, were found on 30 U.S state websites, including some where the app has been banned for official use.
Other countries including Denmark, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand, along with the European Union, have already banned TikTok from devices issued to government employees.
David Kennedy, a former government intelligence officer who runs the cybersecurity company TrustedSec, agrees with restricting TikTok access on government-issued phones because they might contain sensitive information. A nationwide ban, however, might be too extreme, he said. He also wondered where it might lead.
“We have Tesla in China, we have Microsoft in China, we have Apple in China. Are they going to start banning us now?” Kennedy said. “It could escalate very quickly.”
Lil Yachty, Lindsay Lohan, Ne-Yo, Soulja Boy and Austin Mahone are among a number of celebrities who have been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for peddling crypto currencies “without disclosing that they were compensated for doing so and the amount of their compensation,” according to an SEC announcement Wednesday (March 22).
The artists were charged as part of a larger investigation into crypto companies Tron Foundation Limited, Bit Torrent Foundation Limited, Rainberry Inc and their founder Justin Sun for the “unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT).” The SEC also alleges that Sun “fraudulently manipulat[ed] the secondary market” and “orchestrat[ed] a scheme to pay celebrities to tout TRX and BTT without disclosing their compensation” among other accusations.
The SEC also charged adult film star Kendra Lust and influencer Jake Paul in the case. So far, all of the celebrities tied to Sun and his crypto firms — apart from Mahone and Soulja Boy — have reached settlements with the SEC, paying over $400,000 in “disgorgement, interest and penalties… without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings.”
The SEC’s complaint against Sun and his companies was filed March 22 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
“This case demonstrates again the high risk investors face when crypto asset securities are offered and sold without proper disclosure,” said SEC chair Gary Gensler. “As alleged, Sun and his companies not only targeted U.S. investors in their unregistered offers and sales, generating millions in illegal proceeds at the expense of investors, but they also coordinated wash trading on an unregistered trading platform to create the misleading appearance of active trading in TRX. Sun further induced investors to purchase TRX and BTT by orchestrating a promotional campaign in which he and his celebrity promoters hid the fact that the celebrities were paid for their tweets.”
“While we’re neutral about the technologies at issue, we’re anything but neutral when it comes to investor protection,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s division of enforcement. “As alleged in the complaint, Sun and others used an age-old playbook to mislead and harm investors by first offering securities without complying with registration and disclosure requirements and then manipulating the market for those very securities. At the same time, Sun paid celebrities with millions of social media followers to tout the unregistered offerings, while specifically directing that they not disclose their compensation. This is the very conduct that the federal securities laws were designed to protect against regardless of the labels Sun and others used.”
TikTok is ramping up a public relations campaign to fend off the possibility of a nationwide ban by the Biden administration, and it’s bringing some unconventional advocates to help: online influencers.
Dozens of TikTok creators — some with millions of followers on the video-sharing app — came to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to lobby in favor of the platform, one day before lawmakers are slated to grill the company’s chief executive about concerns over user data falling into the hands of the Chinese government.
Shou Zi Chew plans to tell Congress on Thursday that TikTok, which was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, is committed to user safety, data protection and security, and keeping the platform free from Chinese government influence. He will also answer questions from U.S. lawmakers worried about the social media platform’s effects on its young user base.
At the heart of TikTok’s trouble is a Chinese national intelligence law that would compel Chinese companies to fork over data to the government for whatever purposes it deems to involve national security. There’s also concern Beijing might try to push pro-China narratives or misinformation through the platform.
At a media event coordinated by TikTok on Wednesday, some content creators acknowledged that concerns about data security are legitimate, but pointed to precautions the company is taking, such as a $1.5 billion plan — dubbed Project Texas — to route all U.S. data to domestic servers owned and maintained by the software giant Oracle.
TikTok has been attempting to sell that proposal to the Biden administration, but skeptics have argued it doesn’t go far enough. The administration is reportedly demanding the company’s Chinese owners sell their stakes or face a nationwide ban.
“I don’t know much about politics, but I know a lot about fashion, and I know a lot about people,” Ok said. “And just to be here and share my story is what TikTok has invited me to do.”
Tensions around TikTok have been building on Capitol Hill, reaching a boiling point late last year when a proposal to ban the app off of government phones passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Joe Biden. House Republicans are pushing a bill that would give Biden the power to ban the app.
Other bills have also been introduced — some bipartisan — including a measure that would circumvent the challenges the administration would face in court if it moved forward with sanctions against the social media company.
The effort to target TikTok is part of a larger, tougher approach that Congress has taken in the past several months as China’s relationship with two U.S. adversaries — Russia and Iran — has come into focus. A recent incident with a spy balloon forced even some wary congressional Democrats to join Republicans in opposition, and there is now a strong bipartisan concern in Washington that Beijing would use legal and regulatory power to seize American user data or use the platform to push favorable narratives or misinformation.
TikTok’s response to the political pressure can be seen all around the nation’s Capitol, with the company putting up ads in area airports and metro stations that include promises of securing users data and privacy and creating a safe platform for its young users. Last year, the company spent more than $5.3 million on dispatching lobbyists to the Hill to make its case, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks lobbying spending.
On Thursday, Chew will be sticking to a familiar script as he urges officials against pursuing an all-out ban on TikTok or for the company to be sold off to new owners. TikTok’s efforts to ensure the security of its users’ data go “above and beyond” what any of its rivals are doing, according to Chew’s prepared remarks released ahead of his appearance before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Chew pushed back against fears that TikTok could become a tool of China’s ruling Communist Party because its parent company, ByteDance, was founded in Beijing and also operates from there.
“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said.
He distanced TikTok from its Chinese roots and denied the “inaccurate” belief that TikTok’s corporate structure makes it “beholden to the Chinese government.” ByteDance has evolved into a privately held “global enterprise,” Chew said, with 60% owned by big institutional investors, 20% owned by the Chinese entrepreneurs who founded it and the rest by employees.
It’s “emphatically untrue” that TikTok sends data on its American users to Beijing, he said.
“TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, U.S. user data with the Chinese government,” Chew said. “Nor would TikTok honor such a request if one were ever made.”
Whether those promises will alleviate concern is another matter. TikTok has come under fire in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific, where a growing number of governments have banned the app from devices used for official business. India, Afghanistan and Indonesia have banned it nationwide.
Chew, a 40-year-old Singaporean who was appointed CEO in 2021, said in a TikTok video this week that the congressional hearing comes at a “pivotal moment” for the company, which now has 150 million American users.
Chew said TikTok’s data security project is the right answer, not a ban or a sale of the company.
“No other social media company, or entertainment platform like TikTok, provides this level of access and transparency,” he said.
The company started deleting the historical protected data of U.S. users from non-Oracle servers this month, Chew said. When that process is completed later this year, all U.S. data will be protected by American law and controlled by a U.S.-led security team.
“Under this structure, there is no way for the Chinese government to access it or compel access to it,” he said.
He said a TikTok ban would hurt the U.S. economy and small American businesses that use the app to sell their products, while reducing competition in an “increasingly concentrated market.” He added that a sale “would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access.”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew posted an urgent video on the app on Tuesday (March 21) that aimed to demonstrate how ingrained TikTok is in the lives of more than 150 million Americans at a time when the app is under threat of being banned (again).
Chew is set to testify before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Thursday. His appearance comes as politicians and regulators repeatedly express concern that TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, will turn user data over to the Chinese government. (TikTok has repeatedly denied these allegations.) Earlier this month, TikTok said the U.S. government had asked Bytedance to sell the app or face a ban, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Chew’s video started out celebratory and seemed couched in terms straight out of U.S. political debates, emphasizing the app’s reach and its potential economic impact. “I’m super excited to announce that more than 150 million Americans are on TikTok,” Chew said. The app had previously touted 100 million U.S. users in 2020. (It has over 1 billion active users globally.)
“That’s almost half the U.S. coming to TikTok to connect, to create, to share, to learn, or just to have some fun,” Chew continued. “This includes 5 million businesses that use TikTok to reach their customers. And the majority of these are small and medium businesses.”
@tiktok Our CEO, Shou Chew, shares a special message on behalf of the entire TikTok team to thank our community of 150 million Americans ahead of his congressional hearing later this week. ♬ original sound – TikTok
But this triumphant tone quickly gave way to a warning. “Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok,” Chew added. “This could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you.” He called this a “pivotal moment” for the app and asked users to leave comments noting “what they love about TikTok” so he could pass those on during his meetings in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. government’s scrutiny of TikTok is not new; President Trump threatened to ban the app back in 2020. (India did ban the app that year.) TikTok has been in lengthy talks with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to try to come up with a solution that allays fears about the way it handles users’ data, but these negotiations appear to have made little headway. The U.S. government recently banned TikTok from all federal devices.
TikTok spokespeople have described the threat of a larger ban as “little more than political theater.”
“If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn’t solve the problem,” a spokeswoman for TikTok told The Associated Press earlier this month. “A change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access.”
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Source: MARK RALSTON / Getty / Gears of War
We are one step closer to that long-awaited television adaption of Gears of War.
Variety exclusively reports that Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Jon Spaihts has boarded Netflix’s forthcoming adaptation of the popular Xbox video game, Gears of War.
Spaihts has co-written 2021’s Dune, the upcoming Dune sequel, and Doctor Strange and hopes to deliver another great television adaptation of a video game franchise.
“Gears of War’ is one of the all-time great action games, with vivid characters, a beautifully designed world, and a combat system that drives home the lethality of war and the importance of standing by your squadmates. It wants to be cinema, and I’m thrilled to have the chance to help that happen,” Spaihts told Variety in a statement.
The Netflix film is just one part of the GOW universe it hopes to build after landing a deal with Gears of War developer, The Coalition in November 2022. If all goes as planned, the feature film will come first, with an adult animated series behind it and then potentially spinoff series.
The game centers around human civilization as they fight to survive against a subterranean threat called The Locust Horde. The human race’s last hope lies with a disgraced sergeant, Marcus Fenix, who leads Delta Squad, a ragtag group of soldiers.
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“We’re thrilled to partner with Jon and the Netflix team to bring ‘Gears of War’ to life,” The Coalition said. “Jon is a master storyteller with a talent for creating epic, science-fiction universes, and he truly loves ‘Gears of War.’ We couldn’t ask for a better partner to honor our franchise and deliver an authentic story to our fans.”
Does This Mean Dave Bautista Is Joining The Project?
This is the most significant development in adapting Gears of War into a film. Before Netflix got on board, New Line Cinema acquired the rights to turn GOW into a film in 2007, before Scott Stuber, now head of original films at Netflix, joined Epic Games as a producer in 2013.
Universal hired F. Scott Frazier to pen an adaption in 2018, but nothing ever came of that.
As far as casting, one name has come up for years, and it’s none other than Dave Bautista, who fans have chosen from the jump to play Marcus Fenix because of the uncanny resemblance.
The former WWE superstar turned actor has even lobbied for the role, and it also helps The Coalition’s release of DLC using Bautista’s likeness in the game.
With Spaihts onboard, it makes all the sense for Bautista to land the role since they worked together on both Dune and Dune: Part Two.
So, with that said, make it happen. Give Bautista the role. Looking at you, Netflix.
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Photo: MARK RALSTON / Getty
TikTok went on a counteroffensive Tuesday amid increasing Western pressure over cybersecurity and misinformation concerns, rolling out updated rules and standards for content as its CEO warned against a possible U.S. ban on the Chinese-owned video sharing app.
CEO Shou Zi Chew is scheduled to appear Thursday before U.S. congressional lawmakers, who will grill him about the company’s privacy and data-security practices and relationship with the Chinese government.
Chew said in a TikTok video that the hearing “comes at a pivotal moment” for the company, after lawmakers introduced measures that would expand the Biden administration’s authority to enact a U.S. ban on the app, which the CEO said more than 150 million Americans use.
“Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok. Now this could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you,” said Chew, who was dressed casually in jeans and blue hoodie, with the dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington in the background.
“I’ll be testifying before Congress this week to share all that we’re are doing to protect Americans using the app,” he said.
TikTok app has come under fire in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific, where a growing number of governments have banned TikTok from devices used for official business over worries it poses risks to cybersecurity and data privacy or could be used to push pro-Beijing narratives and misinformation.
So far, there is no evidence to suggest this has happened or that TikTok has turned over user data to the Chinese government, as some of its critics have argued it would do.
Norway and the Netherlands on Tuesday warned apps like TikTok should not be installed on phones issued to government employees, both citing security or intelligence agencies.
There’s a “high risk” if TikTok or Telegram are installed on devices that have access to “internal digital infrastructure or services,” Norway’s justice ministry said, without providing further details.
TikTok also rolled out updated rules and standards for content and users in a reorganized set of community guidelines that include eight principles to guide content moderation decisions.
“These principles are based on our commitment to uphold human rights and aligned with international legal frameworks,” said Julie de Bailliencourt, TikTok’s global head of product policy.
She said TikTok strives to be fair, protect human dignity and balance freedom of expression with preventing harm.
The guidelines, which take effect April 21, were repackaged from TikTok’s existing rules with extra details and explanations.
Among the more significant changes are additional details about its restrictions on deepfakes, also known as synthetic media created by artificial intelligence technology. TikTok more clearly spells out its policy, saying all deepfakes or manipulated content that show realistic scenes must be labeled to indicate they’re fake or altered in some way.
TikTok had previously banned deepfakes that mislead viewers about real-world events and cause harm. Its updated guidelines say deepfakes of private figures and young people are also not allowed.
Deepfakes of public figures are OK in certain contexts, such as for artistic or educational content, but not for political or commercial endorsements.
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Source: SOPA Images / Getty / Xbox
Microsoft is working hard to get Xbox on as many platforms as possible, including smartphones. That could be a reality soon, but it all hinges on one big thing.
Speaking with the Financial Times, Xbox Chief Phil Spencer, spoke on the company’s ambition to bring an Xbox Games Store to the iPhone sometime this year, but that all depends on current regulatory measures.
The biggest roadblock is Microsoft’s $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, currently in limbo, according to the chief executive of Microsoft Gaming, that would give the tech giant a wide portfolio of mobile games. The app store’s launch also hinges on the EU’s Digital Markets Act plus other regulations that will allow for the enforcement of other app stores to appear on iOS.
“We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play,” Spencer said to the Financial Times. “Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices, but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up.”
Apple Is Preparing For The Launch of Alternative Store Apps on The iPhone
Apple, who is notoriously protective of its sh*t, is prepping iOS for the upcoming change by preparing to allow alternative app stores on the iPhone to comply with the Digital Markets Act that reportedly coming into play in March 2024, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Gurman further reports Apple will roll out the changes with iOS 17 updates for iPhone next year in Europe only so that still leaves American iPhone users out of the loop.
Currently, you can access Xbox games on your mobile devices through the Xbox Cloud Gaming’s web client, and while it works smoothly depending on certain factors like internet connection, it’s not as stable as a dedicated app would be.
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Photo: SOPA Images / Getty