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    The Lie Detectives: Trump, US politics and the disinformation damage done

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    Most of Joe Biden’s past supporters see him as too old. An 81-year-old president with an unsteady step is a turn-off. But Donald Trump, Biden’s malignant, 77-year-old predecessor, vows to be a dictator for “a day”, calls for suspending the constitution and threatens Nato. “Russia, if you’re listening”, his infamous 2016 shout-out to Vladimir Putin, still haunts us eight years on. Democracy is on the ballot again.Against this bleak backdrop, Sasha Issenberg delivers The Lie Detectives, an examination of disinformation in politics. It is a fitting follow-up to The Victory Lab, his look at GOTV (“getting out the vote”) which was published weeks before the 2012 US election.Issenberg lectures at UCLA and writes for Monocle. He has covered presidential campaigns for the Boston Globe and he co-founded Votecastr, a private venture designed to track, project and publish real-time results. Voting science, though, is nothing if not tricky. A little after 4pm on election day 2016, hours before polls closed, Votecastr calculations led Slate to pronounce: Hillary Clinton Has to Like Where She Stands in Florida.The Victory Lab and The Lie Detectives are of a piece, focused on the secret sauce of winning campaigns. More than a decade ago, Issenberg gave props to Karl Rove, the architect of George W Bush’s successful election drives, and posited that micro-targeting voters had become key to finishing first. He also observed that ideological conflicts had become marbled through American politics. On that front, there has been an acceleration. These days, January 6 and its aftermath linger but much of the country has moved on, averting its gaze or embracing alternative facts.In 2016, Issenberg and Joshua Green of Businessweek spoke to Trump campaign digital gurus who bragged of using the internet to discourage prospective Clinton supporters.“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” Issenberg and Green quote a senior official as saying. “They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans.”It was micro-targeting on steroids.The exchange stuck with Issenberg. “I thought back often to that conversation with the Trump officials in the years that followed,” he writes now. “I observed so much else online that was manufactured and perpetuated with a similarly brazen impunity.”In The Lie Detectives, Issenberg pays particular attention and respect to Jiore Craig and her former colleagues at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a leading Democratic polling and strategy firm founded by Stan Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s pollster. Issenberg also examines the broader liberal ecosystem and its members, including the billionaire Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn and PayPal. The far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his “office of hate” come under the microscope too.Craig’s experience included more than a dozen elections across six continents. But until Trump’s triumph, she had not worked on a domestic race. To her, to quote Issenberg, US politics was essentially “a foreign country”. Nonetheless, Craig emerged as the Democrats’ go-to for countering disinformation.“It was a unique moment in time where everybody who had looked for an answer up until that point had been abundantly wrong,” Craig says. “The fact that I had to start every race in a new country with the building blocks allowed me to see things that you couldn’t.”No party holds a monopoly on disinformation. In a 2017 special election for US Senate in Alabama, Democratic-aligned consultants launched Project Birmingham, a $100,000 disinformation campaign under which Republicans were urged to cast write-in ballots instead of voting for Roy Moore, the controversial GOP candidate.The project posed as a conservative operation. Eventually, Hoffman acknowledged funding it, but disavowed knowledge of disinformation and said sorry. Doug Jones, the Democrat, won by fewer than 22,000 votes. The write-in total was 22,819.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore recently, Steve Kramer, a campaign veteran working for Dean Phillips, a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination against Biden, launched an AI-generated robocall that impersonated the president.Comparing himself to Paul Revere and Thomas Paine, patriots who challenged the mother country, Kramer, who also commissioned a deepfake impersonation of Senator Lindsey Graham, said Phillips was not in on the effort. If the sorry little episode showed anything, it showed disinformation is here to stay.Under the headline Disinformation on steroids: is the US prepared for AI’s influence on the election?, a recent Guardian story said: “Without clear safeguards, the impact of AI on the election might come down to what voters can discern as real and not real.”Free speech is on the line. Last fall, the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – “the Trumpiest court in America”, as Vox put it – unanimously held that Biden, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FBI violated the first amendment by seeking to tamp down on Covid-related misinformation.In the court’s view, social media platforms were impermissibly “coerced” or “significantly encouraged” to suppress speech government officials viewed as dangerously inaccurate or misleading. The matter remains on appeal, oral argument before the supreme court set for later this month.Issenberg reminds us that Trump’s current presidential campaign has pledged that a second Trump administration will bar government agencies from assisting any effort to “label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information”. A commitment to free speech? Not exactly. More like Putinism, US-style.According to Kash Patel, a Trump administration veteran and true believer, a second Trump administration will target journalists for prosecution.“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”Welcome to the Trump Vengeance tour.
    The Lie Detectives is published in the US by Columbia University’s Columbia Global Reports More

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      TechScape: As the US election campaign heats up, so could the market for misinformation

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      X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced it will allow political advertising back on the platform – reversing a global ban on political ads since 2019. The move is the latest to stoke concerns about the ability of big tech to police online misinformation ahead of the 2024 elections – and X is not the only platform being scrutinised.Social media firms’ handlings of misinformation and divisive speech reached a breaking point in the 2020 US presidential elections when Donald Trump used online platforms to rile up his base, culminating in the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. But in the time since, companies have not strengthened their policies to prevent such crises, instead slowly stripping protections away. This erosion of safeguards, coupled with the rise of artificial intelligence, could create a perfect storm for 2024, experts warn.As the election cycle heats up, Twitter’s move this week is not the first to raise major concerns about the online landscape for 2024 – and it won’t be the last.Musk’s free speech fantasyTwitter’s change to election advertising policies is hardly surprising to those following the platform’s evolution under the leadership of Elon Musk, who purchased the company in 2022. In the months since his takeover, the erratic billionaire has made a number of unilateral changes to the site – not least of all the rebrand of Twitter to X.Many of these changes have centered on Musk’s goal to make Twitter profitable at all costs. The platform, he complained, was losing $4m per day at the time of his takeover, and he stated in July that its cash flow was still in the negative. More than half of the platform’s top advertisers have fled since the takeover – roughly 70% of the platforms leading advertisers were not spending there as of last December. For his part, this week Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, saying, “based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss”. Whatever the reason, his decision to re-allow political advertisers could help boost revenue at a time when X sorely needs it.But it’s not just about money. Musk has identified himself as a “free speech absolutist” and seems hell bent on turning the platform into a social media free-for-all. Shortly after taking the helm of Twitter, he lifted bans on the accounts of Trump and other rightwing super-spreaders of misinformation. Ahead of the elections, he has expressed a goal of turning Twitter into “digital town square” where voters and candidates can discuss politics and policies – solidified recently by its (disastrous) hosting of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign announcement.Misinformation experts and civil rights advocates have said this could spell disaster for future elections. “Elon Musk is using his absolute control over Twitter to exert dangerous influence over the 2024 election,” said Imran Ahmed, head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a disinformation and hate speech watchdog that Musk himself has targeted in recent weeks.In addition to the policy changes, experts warn that the massive workforce reduction Twitter has carried out under Musk could impact the ability to deal with misinformation, as trust and safety teams are now reported to be woefully understaffed.Let the misinformation wars beginWhile Musk’s decisions have been the most high profile in recent weeks, it is not the only platform whose policies have raised alarm. In June, YouTube reversed its election integrity policy, now allowing content contesting the validity of the 2020 elections to remain on the platform. Meanwhile, Meta has also reinstated accounts of high-profile spreaders of misinformation, including Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr.Experts say these reversals could create an environment similar to that which fundamentally threatened democracy in 2020. But now there is an added risk: the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence tools. Generative AI, which has increased its capabilities in the last year, could streamline the ability to manipulate the public on a massive scale.Meta has a longstanding policy that exempts political ads from its misinformation policies and has declined to state whether that immunity will extend to manipulated and AI-generated images in the upcoming elections. Civil rights watchdogs have envisioned a worst-case scenario in which voters’ feeds are flooded with deceptively altered and fabricated images of political figures, eroding their ability to trust what they read online and chipping away at the foundations of democracy.While Twitter is not the only company rolling back its protections against misinformation, its extreme stances are moving the goalposts for the entire industry. The Washington Post reported this week that Meta was considering banning all political advertising on Facebook, but reversed course to better compete with its rival Twitter, which Musk had promised to transform into a haven for free speech. Meta also dissolved its Facebook Journalism Project, tasked with promoting accurate information online, and its “responsible innovation team,” which monitored the company’s products for potential risks, according to the Washington Post.Twitter may be the most scrutinised in recent weeks, but it’s clear that almost all platforms are moving towards an environment in which they throw up their hands and say they cannot or will not police dangerous misinformation online – and that should concern us all.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe wider TechScape David Shariatmadari goes deep with the co-founder of DeepMind about the mind-blowing potential of artificial intelligence in biotech in this long read. New tech news site 404 Media has published a distressing investigation into AI-generated mushroom-foraging books on Amazon. In a space where misinformation could mean the difference between eating something delicious and something deadly, the stakes are high. If you can’t beat them, join them: celebrities have been quietly working to sign deals licensing their artificially generated likenesses as the AI arms race continues. Elsewhere in AI – scammers are on the rise, and their tactics are terrifying. And the Guardian has blocked OpenAI from trawling its content. Can you be “shadowbanned” on a dating app? Some users are convinced their profiles are not being prioritised in the feed. A look into this very modern anxiety, and how the algorithms of online dating actually work. More

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      You think the internet is a clown show now? You ain’t seen nothing yet | John Naughton

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr is a flake of Cadbury proportions with a famous name. He’s the son of Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination (and therefore also JFK’s nephew). Let’s call him Junior. For years – even pre-Covid-19 – he’s been running a vigorous anti-vaccine campaign and peddling conspiracy theories. In 2021, for example, he was claiming that Dr Anthony Fauci was in cahoots with Bill Gates and the big pharma companies to run a “powerful vaccination cartel” that would prolong the pandemic and exaggerate its deadly effects with the aim of promoting expensive vaccinations. And it went without saying (of course) that the mainstream media and big tech companies were also in on the racket and busily suppressing any critical reporting of it.Like most conspiracists, Junior was big on social media, but then in 2021 his Instagram account was removed for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and in August last year his anti-vaccination Children’s Health Defense group was removed by Facebook and Instagram on the grounds that it had repeatedly violated Meta’s medical-misinformation policies.But guess what? On 4 June, Instagram rescinded Junior’s suspension, enabling him to continue beaming his baloney, without let or hindrance, to his 867,000 followers. How come? Because he announced that he’s running against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination and Meta, Instagram’s parent, has a policy that users should be able to engage with posts from “political leaders”. “As he is now an active candidate for president of the United States,” it said, “we have restored access to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Instagram account.”Which naturally is also why the company allowed Donald Trump back on to its platform. So in addition to anti-vax propaganda, American voters can also look forward in 2024 to a flood of denialism about the validity of the 2020 election on their social media feeds as Republican acolytes of Trump stand for election and get a free pass from Meta and co.All of which led technology journalist Casey Newton, an astute observer of these things, to advance an interesting hypothesis last week about what’s happening. We may, he said, have passed “peak trust and safety”. Translation: we may have passed the point where tech platforms stopped caring about moderating what happens on their platforms. From now on, (almost) anything goes.If that’s true, then we have reached the most pivotal moment in the evolution of the tech industry since 1996. That was the year when two US legislators inserted a short clause – section 230 – into the Communications Decency Act that was then going through Congress. In 26 words, the clause guaranteed immunity for online computer services with respect to third-party content generated by its users. It basically meant that if you ran an online service on which people could post whatever they liked, you bore no legal liability for any of the bad stuff that could happen as a result of those publications.On the basis of that keep-out-of-jail card, corporations such as Google, Meta and Twitter prospered mightily for years. Bad stuff did indeed happen, but no legal shadow fell on the owners of the platforms on which it was hosted. Of course it often led to bad publicity – but that was ameliorated or avoided by recruiting large numbers of (overseas and poorly paid) moderators, whose job was to ensure that the foul things posted online did not sully the feeds of delicate and fastidious users in the global north.But moderation is difficult and often traumatising work. And, given the scale of the problem, keeping social media clean is an impossible, sisyphean task. The companies employ many thousands of moderators across the globe, but they can’t keep up with the deluge. For a time, these businesses argued that artificial intelligence (meaning machine-learning technology) would enable them to get on top of it. But the AI that can outwit the ingenuity of the bad actors who lurk in the depths of the internet has yet to be invented.And, more significantly perhaps, times have suddenly become harder for tech companies. The big ones are still very profitable, but that’s partly because they been shedding jobs at a phenomenal rate. And many of those who have been made redundant worked in areas such as moderation, or what the industry came to call “trust and safety”. After all, if there’s no legal liability for the bad stuff that gets through whatever filters there are, why keep these worthy custodians on board?Which is why democracies will eventually have to contemplate what was hitherto unthinkable: rethink section 230 and its overseas replications and make platforms legally liable for the harms that they enable. And send Junior back to the soapbox he deserves.What I’ve been readingHere’s looking at usTechno-Narcissism is Scott Galloway’s compelling blogpost on his No Mercy / No Malice site about the nauseating hypocrisy of the AI bros.Ode to JoyceThe Paris Review website has the text of novelist Sally Rooney’s 2022 TS Eliot lecture, Misreading Ulysses.Man of lettersRemembering Robert Gottlieb, Editor Extraordinaire is a lovely New Yorker piece by David Remnick on one of his predecessors, who has just died. More

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      Failure to launch: Twitter glitches deal double blow to Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis

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      The screen kept saying “Preparing to launch”. But this wasn’t one of Elon Musk’s space rockets that soars through the stratosphere and settles into a comfortable orbit. This was one that blew up on the pad in a dazzling ball of flame.The eccentric billionaire had invited Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to the somewhat niche Twitter Spaces – a dedicated audio streaming feature on the social media platform – to announce his run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.For Musk it looked like an easy win in his effort to make Twitter the public square, especially one that attracts rightwing blowhards, and steal a march on Fox News. For DeSantis it seemed like a chance to make a bit of political history, show off his tech savvy and poke his rival Donald Trump, once the undisputed world tweeting champion.Even better, DeSantis could hold court in an audio-only format without having to meet and greet real people, famously not his strength. But what liberals may have feared as the ultimate alliance of two anti-woke supervillains proved to carry all the menace of a damp dishcloth.Once people had got beyond the “What is Twitter Spaces?” stage, they were greeted with blank windows, broken snatches of conversation and other technical glitches.The site creaked and buckled under the demand of more than half a million users.Moderator David Sacks, a Republican donor and friend of Musk, tried to find a silver lining: “We’ve got so many people here we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.”The debacle was a fresh blow to the credibility of Musk, whose Tesla brand has lost its shine of late and who, having laid off dozens of Twitter staff, seemed to be on the end of divine retribution from the tech gods.It was an even bigger political disaster for DeSantis, who has built the entire theory of his candidacy around the idea that he is an efficient chief executive of Florida who pays attention to detail. Even Trump used to be able to put out 280 characters on Twitter, admittedly often in a seemingly random order.Comedian Trevor Noah once likened DeSantis to Terminator 2, an upgrade on the Trump model that was more efficient and more lethal. But here was the robot in meltdown with smoke pouring out of its ears.Soon, with delicious irony, the phrase “Failure to Launch” was trending on Twitter itself, while one headline observed: “Ron’s Desaster.” Both Trump and Joe Biden seized on the flop to score points and raise funds. A Trump campaign spokesperson said: “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter nearly half an hour of malfunctions, DeSantis finally got going. He declared: “I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback.” But by then thousands of people had given up and tuned out.The governor went to have a dig at Trump. “Government is not entertainment,” he said. “It’s not about building a brand or virtue signaling.”Predictably he griped about coronavirus pandemic measures and the media. An unhealthy chunk of the conversation was devoted to promoting Twitter. The governor said: “I think what was done with Twitter was really significant for the future of our country.”And improbably at the end he said of crash-prone Twitter Spaces: “This is a great platform.”The sorry experience did little to suggest that Musk knows how to run a social media platform or that DeSantis is capable of governing a global superpower armed with nuclear weapons.Perhaps their sole consolation is that they had both been upstaged in the evening news bulletins by the death of rock’n’roller Tina Turner at the age of 83. They could have done worse than fill their long silences with her posthumous plea: We Don’t Need Another Hero. More

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      Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

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      Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
      Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      The TikTok wars – why the US and China are feuding over the app

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      TikTok is once again fending off claims that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, would share user data from its popular video-sharing app with the Chinese government, or push propaganda and misinformation on its behalf.China’s foreign ministry on Wednesday accused the US itself of spreading disinformation about TikTok’s potential security risks following a report in the Wall Street Journal that the committee on foreign investment in the US – part of the treasury department – was threatening a US ban on the app unless its Chinese owners divest their stake.So are the data security risks real? And should users be worried that the TikTok app will be wiped off their phones?Here’s what to know:What are the concerns about TikTok?Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that ByteDance could share TikTok user data – such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers – with China’s authoritarian government.A law implemented by China in 2017 requires companies to give the government any personal data relevant to the country’s national security. There’s no evidence that TikTok has turned over such data, but fears abound due to the vast amount of user data it, like other social media companies, collects.Concerns around TikTok were heightened in December when ByteDance said it fired four employees who accessed data on two journalists from BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times while attempting to track down the source of a leaked report about the company. Just last week, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, told the Senate intelligence committee that TikTok “screams” of national security concerns and that China could also manipulate the algorithm to perpetuate misinformation.“This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government, and to me, it screams out with national security concerns,” Wray said.How is the US responding?White House national security council spokesperson John Kirby declined to comment when asked on Thursday to address the Chinese foreign ministry’s comments about TikTok, citing the review being conducted by the committee on foreign investment.Kirby also could not confirm that the administration sent TikTok a letter warning that the US government may ban the application if its Chinese owners don’t sell its stake but added, “we have legitimate national security concerns with respect to data integrity that we need to observe.”In 2020, then president Donald Trump and his administration sought to force ByteDance to sell off its US assets and ban TikTok from app stores. Courts blocked the effort, and President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s orders but directed an in-depth study of the issue. A planned sale of TikTok’s US assets was also shelved as the Biden administration negotiated a deal with the app that would address some of the national security concerns.In Congress, US senators Richard Blumenthal and Jerry Moran, a Democrat and a Republican, respectively, wrote a letter in February to the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, urging the committee on foreign investment panel, which she chairs, to “swiftly conclude its investigation and impose strict structural restrictions” between TikTok’s US operations and ByteDance, including potentially separating the companies.At the same time, lawmakers have introduced measures that would expand the Biden administration’s authority to enact a national ban on TikTok. The White House has already backed a Senate proposal that has bipartisan support.How has TikTok already been restricted?On Thursday, British authorities said they are banning TikTok on government-issued phones on security grounds, after similar moves by the EU’s executive branch, which temporarily banned TikTok from employee phones. Denmark and Canada have also announced efforts to block the app on government-issued phones.Last month, the White House said it would give US federal agencies 30 days to delete TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices. Congress, the US armed forces and more than half of US states had already banned the app on official devices.What does TikTok say?TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said the company was already answering security concerns through “transparent, US-based protection of US user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification”.In June, TikTok said it would route all data from US users to servers controlled by Oracle, the Silicon Valley company it chose as its US tech partner in 2020 in an effort to avoid a nationwide ban. But it is storing backups of the data in its own servers in the US and Singapore. The company said it expects to delete US user data from its own servers, but it has not provided a timeline as to when that would occur.TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is will testify next week before the House energy and commerce committee about the company’s privacy and data-security practices, as well as its relationship with the Chinese government. In the lead-up to the hearing, Chew has quietly met with several lawmakers – some of whom remain unmoved by their conversation with the 40-year-old executive.After convening with Chew in February, Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado who previously called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, said he remained “fundamentally concerned that TikTok, as a Chinese-owned company, is subject to dictates from the Chinese Communist party”.Meanwhile, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has been trying to position itself as more of an international company – and less of a Chinese company that was founded in Beijing in 2012 by its current chief executive, Liang Rubo, and others.Theo Bertram, TikTok’s vice-president of policy in Europe, said in a tweet on Thursday that ByteDance “is not a Chinese company”. Bertram said its ownership consists of 60% global investors, 20% employees and 20% founders. Its leaders are based in cities such as Singapore, New York, Beijing and other metropolitan areas.Are the security risks legitimate?It depends on whom you ask.Some tech privacy advocates say that while the potential abuse of privacy by the Chinese government is concerning, other tech companies have data-harvesting business practices that also exploit user information.“If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should advocate for a basic privacy law that bans all companies from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone,” said Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future.Karim Farhat, a researcher with the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech, said a TikTok sale would be “completely irrelevant to any of the alleged ‘national security’ threats” and go against “every free market principle and norm” of the state department’s internet freedom principles.Others say there is legitimate reason for concern.People who use TikTok might think they’re not doing anything that would be of interest to a foreign government, but that’s not always the case, said Anton Dahbura, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. Important information about the US is not strictly limited to nuclear power plants or military facilities; it extends to other sectors, such as food processing, the finance industry and universities, Dahbura said.Is there precedence for banning tech companies?Last year, the US banned the sale of communications equipment made by Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE, citing risks to national security. But banning the sale of items could be more easily done than banning an app, which is accessed through the web.Such a move might also go to the courts on grounds that it could violate the first amendment as some civil liberties groups have argued. More

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      White House backs bill that could give it power to ban TikTok nationwide

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      White House backs bill that could give it power to ban TikTok nationwideThe bill would allow commerce department to impose restrictions on technologies that pose a risk to national securityThe White House said it backed legislation introduced on Tuesday by a dozen senators to give the administration new powers to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.The endorsement boosts efforts by a number of lawmakers to ban the popular ByteDance-owned app, which is used by more than 100 million Americans.‘Abusing state power’: China lashes out at US over TikTok bansRead moreThe bill gives the commerce department the authority to impose restrictions up to and including banning TikTok and other technologies that pose national security risks, said Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the intelligence committee.He said it would also apply to foreign technologies from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.TikTok said in a statement that any “US ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide”.The bill would require the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, to identify and address foreign threats to information and communications technology products and services. Raimondo’s office declined to comment.The group, led by Warner and Republican Senator John Thune, includes Democrats Tammy Baldwin, Joe Manchin, Michael Bennett, Kirsten Gillibrand and Martin Heinrich along with Republicans Deb Fischer, Jerry Moran, Dan Sullivan, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, Warner’s office said.Warner said it was important the government do more to make clear what it believes are the national security risks to the US from the use of TikTok.White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan praised the bipartisan bill saying it “would strengthen our ability to address discrete risks posed by individual transactions, and systemic risks posed by certain classes of transactions involving countries of concern in sensitive technology sectors”.“We look forward to continue working with both Democrats and Republicans on this bill, and urge Congress to act quickly to send it to the president’s desk,” he said in a statement.TikTok has come under increasing fire over fears user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests.TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew is due to appear before Congress on 23 March.The House foreign affairs committee last week voted along party lines on a bill sponsored by Representative Michael McCaul to give Biden the power to ban TikTok after then president Donald Trump was stymied by courts in 2020 in his efforts to ban the app along with the Chinese messaging app WeChat.Democrats opposed McCaul’s bill, saying it was rushed and required due diligence through debate and consultation with experts. Some major bills aimed at China like the Chips funding bill took 18 months to win approval. McCaul said he thinks the full US House of Representatives could vote on the bill this month.TopicsTikTokChinaAppsUS politicsInternetBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Why did the US just ban TikTok from government-issued cellphones?

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      ExplainerWhy did the US just ban TikTok from government-issued cellphones?Trump tried to impose a total ban on the China-based app and some states have already prohibited its use on official devices The US government has approved an unprecedented ban on the use of TikTok on federal government devices. The restrictions – tucked into a spending bill just days before it was passed by Congress, and signed by Joe Biden on Thursday – add to growing uncertainty about the app’s future in the US amid a crackdown from state and federal lawmakers.Officials say the ban is necessary due to national security concerns about the China-based owner of the app, ByteDance. But it also leaves many questions unanswered. Here’s what you need to know.TikTok admits using its app to spy on reporters in effort to track leaksRead moreWhy did the ban happen?The US government has banned TikTok on federal government-issued devices due to national security concerns over its China-based parent company, ByteDance. The US fears that the Chinese government may leverage TikTok to access those devices and US user data. TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said the company was “disappointed” that Congress moved forward with the proposal and that it was “a political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests”.The ban means that, in about two months, federal government employees will be required to remove TikTok from their government-issued devices unless they are using the app for national security or law enforcement activities.The director of the US Office of Management and Budget and other offices have 60 days to come up with standards and processes for all government employees to remove the app from their phones. Several federal agencies such as the White House and the defense, homeland security and state departments have already banned TikTok, so it won’t change anything for those employees. And earlier this week, Catherine Szpindor, the chief administrator of the House of Representatives, also instructed all staff and lawmakers to delete the app from their devices.How did we get here?US security concerns about TikTok have existed for years. Donald Trump first attempted, unsuccessfully, to ban TikTok in 2020, but bipartisan efforts to regulate and rein in use of the app reached a fever pitch in 2022 after news outlets reported ByteDance employees were accessing US TikTok user information.National security concerns were reinforced by warnings from the FBI director, Christopher Wray, that the Chinese government could use the app to gain access to US users’ devices. Several, predominantly Republican-led states – including Texas, South Dakota and Virginia – have also recently banned the use of TikTok on state government-issued devices.In April, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced a similar ban to the one now taking effect, calling TikTok a “Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist party”. The measure, the contours of which were largely replicated in the ban that was passed on Friday, was unanimously approved by the Senate earlier in December.Have other countries taken similar actions against TikTok?While other countries such as Indonesia have imposed temporary bans on TikTok, the biggest country that continues to prohibit the use of the app is India. India permanently banned TikTok along with more than 50 other Chinese apps after a deadly border dispute with China, citing national security concerns. National bans in other countries have not lasted more than, at most, a few months.Should we be more worried about TikTok than other apps?It depends on whom you ask. Several digital privacy and civil advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future say while the potential for China to exploit access to TikTok is indeed concerning, other apps and services offer government entities, including in the US, similar access to user data.“Unless we’re also [going to] ban Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Uber and Grubhub, this is pointless,” said the Fight for the Future director, Evan Greer. “Yes, it’s possibly a bit easier for the Chinese government to gain access to data through TikTok than other apps, but there’s just so many ways governments can get data from apps.”But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced bills and applauded efforts to limit the use of TikTok. In addition to Hawley’s bill, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida introduced a bill to ban the company from operating in the US entirely. “This isn’t about creative videos – this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” Rubio said in a press release announcing the bipartisan bill.The Democratic senator Mark Warner of Virginia has also encouraged efforts to ban TikTok on government devices and called for more states to “take action to keep our government technology out of the CCP’s [Chinese Communist party’s] reach”.What are the geopolitical implications of this ban?The US has ramped up its efforts to address potential national security concerns from China over the last few years, including adding more China-based companies and entities to a commerce department blacklist limiting exports to those firms. The focus on TikTok is part of this larger campaign, but some groups warn that a ban on TikTok would lead to similar moves from China.“Blanket bans on apps based on a company’s foreign ownership will only hurt US businesses in the long run because countries could seek to block US online services over similar national security concerns,” said Gillian Diebold, a policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation.Like other privacy advocates, Diebold said that “policymakers should pursue more promising solutions that address the underlying risks.“For example, to address data concerns, lawmakers should prioritize passing federal privacy legislation to protect consumer data that would explicitly require companies to disclose who they share data with and hold them accountable for those statements,” Diebold said.Could the US ever ban TikTok outright?There have been several attempts at banning TikTok from operating in the US entirely. Rubio’s bill, for instance, would block all of the company’s commercial operations in the US.But the viability of such bans have yet to be proved. Trump’s previous attempt to ban new users from downloading TikTok was blocked in court in part due to free speech concerns. The EFF general counsel, Kurt Opsahl, said a total ban is a violation of free speech and while Rubio’s bill and similar proposed laws to ban TikTok purportedly “protect America from China’s authoritarian government”, they actually adopt “one of the hallmarks of the Chinese internet strategy”.“A government is within its rights to set rules and restrictions on use of official devices it owns, but trying to ban TikTok from public use is something else entirely,” Opsahl said.“TikTok’s security, privacy and its relationship with the Chinese government is indeed concerning, but a total ban is not the answer,” he continued. “A total ban is not narrowly tailored to the least restrictive means to address the security and privacy concerns, and instead lays a censorial blow against the speech of millions of ordinary Americans.”TopicsTikTokUS CongressChinaInternetAppsAsia PacificUS politicsexplainersReuse this content More

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      Trump, Bankman-Fried and Musk are the monsters of American capitalism | Robert Reich

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      Trump, Bankman-Fried and Musk are the monsters of American capitalismRobert ReichFor them, and for everyone who still regards them as heroes, there is no morality in business or economics. The winnings go to the most ruthless If this past week presents any single lesson, it’s the social costs of greed. Capitalism is premised on greed but also on guardrails – laws and norms – that prevent greed from becoming so excessive that it threatens the system as a whole.Yet the guardrails can’t hold when avarice becomes the defining trait of an era, as it is now. Laws and norms are no match for the possibility of raking in billions if you’re sufficiently ruthless and unprincipled.Donald Trump’s tax returns, just made public, reveal that he took bogus deductions to reduce his tax liability all the way to zero in 2020. All told, he reported $60m in losses during his presidency while continuing to pull in big money.Every other president since Nixon has released his tax returns. Trump told America he couldn’t because he was in the middle of an IRS audit. But we now learn that the IRS never got around to auditing Trump during his first two years in office, despite being required to do so by a law dating back to Watergate, stating that “individual tax returns for the president and the vice-president are subject to mandatory review”.Of course, Trump is already synonymous with greed and the aggressive violation of laws and norms in pursuit of money and power. Worse yet, when a president of the United States exemplifies – even celebrates – these traits, they leach out into society like underground poison.Meanwhile, this past week the SEC accused Sam Bankman-Fried of illicitly using customer money from FTX from the beginning to fund his crypto empire.“From the start, contrary to what FTX investors and trading customers were told, Bankman-Fried, actively supported by Defendants, continually diverted FTX customer funds … and then used those funds to continue to grow his empire, using billions of dollars to make undisclosed private venture investments, political contributions, and real estate purchases.”If the charge sticks, it represents one of the largest frauds in American history. Until recently, Bankman-Fried was considered a capitalist hero whose philanthropy was a model for aspiring billionaires (he and his business partner also donated generously to politicians).But like the IRS and Trump, the SEC can’t possibly remedy the social costs that Bankman-Fried has unleashed – not just losses to customers and investors but a deepening distrust and cynicism about the system as a whole, the implicit assumption that this is just what billionaires do, that the way to make a fortune is to blatantly disregard norms and laws, and that only chumps are mindful of the common good.Which brings us to Elon Musk, whose slash-and-burn maneuvers at Twitter might cause even the most rabid capitalist to wince. They also raise questions about Musk’s other endeavor, Tesla. Shares in the electric vehicle maker dropped by almost 9% on Thursday as analysts grew increasingly concerned about its fate. Not only is Musk neglecting the carmaker but he’s appropriating executive talent from Tesla to help him at Twitter. (Tesla stock is down over 64% year-to-date.)Musk has never been overly concerned about laws and norms (you’ll recall that he kept Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, going during the pandemic even when public health authorities refused him permission to do so, resulting in a surge of Covid infections among workers). For him, it’s all about imposing his gargantuan will on others.Trump, Bankman-Fried and Musk are the monsters of American capitalism – as much products of this public-be-damned era as they are contributors to it. For them, and for everyone who still regards them as heroes, there is no morality in business or economics. The winnings go to the most ruthless. Principles are for sissies.But absent any moral code, greed is a public danger. Its poison cannot be contained by laws or accepted norms. Everyone is forced to guard against the next con (or else pull an even bigger con). Laws are broken whenever the gains from breaking them exceed the penalties (multiplied by the odds of getting caught). Social trust erodes.Adam Smith, the so-called father of modern capitalism, never called himself an economist. He called himself a “moral philosopher,” engaged in discovering the characteristics of a good society. He thought his best book was not The Wealth of Nations, the bible of modern capitalist apologists, but the Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he argued that the ethical basis of society lies in compassion for other human beings.Presumably Adam Smith would have bemoaned the growing inequalities, corruption, and cynicism spawned by modern capitalism and three of its prime exemplars – Trump, Bankman-Fried, and Musk.TopicsUS newsOpinionUS politicsUS taxationDonald TrumpSam Bankman-FriedFTXUS economycommentReuse this content More