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      The Independent review – Jodie Turner-Smith and Brian Cox chase political scandal

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      ReviewThe Independent review – Jodie Turner-Smith and Brian Cox chase political scandalTurner-Smith and Cox team up as journalists investigating a presidential candidate. But there is none of the insider authenticity of director Amy Rice’s earlier Obama documentaryFilm-maker Amy Rice spent two years on the campaign trail with Barack Obama to make a 2009 fly-on-the wall documentary. So it’s massively disappointing that her new fictional political thriller is so insipid and unsatisfying, and completely lacks any kind of authentic insider knowledge of Machiavellian political skullduggery. It’s as generic as they come, though British actor Jodie Turner-Smith is brilliant as a rookie reporter for the fictional Washington Chronicle who uncovers a scandal with the potential to blow open the presidential race.Turner-Smith’s character, Eli James, is increasingly frustrated at having to write clickbait lifestyle articles such as “college dorm must-haves”. But when she uncovers a lottery scandal, she teams up with the paper’s Pulitzer-winning columnist Nicholas Booker (Brian Cox, giving a lefty-intelligentsia version of his alpha-ego male in Succession). Their relationship is nicely played, especially by Turner-Smith, who makes Eli a satisfyingly complicated woman: super smart and competitive, a bit reckless and most of all determined – as she’s had to be as a woman of colour in a largely male, mostly white world.The lottery scandal is linked to political funding and seems to lead right to the Republican presidential candidate Patricia Turnbull (Ann Dowd, channelling Matilda’s Mrs Trunchbull). She’s neck and neck with the Democratic incumbent; then an independent enters the fray. This is mega-celebrity Olympic gold medallist Nate Sterling (ex-WWE wrestler John Cena): he’s promising to take action on climate change, and has the right kind of lantern-jawed all-American jock appeal for rightwingers. Eli’s boyfriend Lucas (Luke Kirby) is a speechwriter for Sterling – who may be too good to be true.There’s a twist at the end that is anticlimactic and uninteresting, and the script is unforgivably clumsy in places. Twice, characters obtain vital information illicitly from computers left unlocked by individuals with a lot to hide. Cox’s veteran journalist is famous for eating his steaks cooked bloody – not just rare. But really this film could be juicier.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTopicsFilmThrillersUS politicsNewspapersBrian CoxreviewsReuse this content More

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      How Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’

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      AnalysisHow Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’Charles Kaiser in New York Document makes clear senior Fox News figures knew after 2020 election voter fraud claims were false – and it’s likely a landmark caseThe Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said Dominion Voting Systems’ brief requesting summary judgment against Fox News for defamation – and $1.6bn – is “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark” in the history of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.Fox News hosts thought Trump’s election fraud claims were ‘total BS’, court filings showRead more“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”The case concerns Fox News’s repetition of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines.Tribe said the filing “establishes that Fox was not only reckless” but also that producers, owners and personalities were “deliberately lying and knew they were lying about the nature of Dominion’s machines and the supposed way they could be manipulated”.Filed last week, the 192-page document makes it clear that senior figures at Fox News from Rupert Murdoch down knew immediately after the election that claims of voter fraud, in particular those aimed at Dominion, were false.Tucker Carlson called the charges “ludicrous” and “off the rails”. Sean Hannity texted about “F’ing lunatics”. A senior network vice-president called one of the stories “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS”.But none of this knowledge prevented hosts from repeating lies about everything from imaginary algorithms shaving votes from Dominion machines to non-existent ties between the company and Venezuela.Tribe was one of several first amendment experts to call the filing nearly unprecedented.“This is the most remarkable discovery filing I’ve ever read in a commercial litigation,” said Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School lecturer, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor and litigator with clients including CBS and the Associated Press.“A summary judgment motion by a plaintiff in this kind of case is almost unheard of. These suits usually fail because you can’t prove the company you’re suing knew they were spreading falsehoods. That you would have evidence they knew it was a lie is almost unheard of … in this case the sheer volume of all the email and text messages is staggering.”Horton said Dominion’s case gets “huge benefit” from the way Fox employees “express themselves with a huge measure of hyperbole about absolutely everything”.Tribe agreed: “This is one of the first defamation cases in which it is possible to rule for the plaintiff on summary judgment. This is not a request to go to trial. There is no genuinely disputed fact. The defendants were deliberately lying in a manner that was per se libelous and they clearly knew it.”When the Dominion filing was first reported, Fox News said it “mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law”.Lawyers for Fox News claim everything their anchors said was protected by the first amendment.Other lawyers are skeptical.“You may have a first amendment right to report on what the president said but you have no right to validate a statement that you know to be false,” said Steven Shapiro, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and counsel or co-counsel on more than 200 supreme court briefs.David Korzenik is a leading libel lawyer whose clients include the Guardian. He said the Dominion case shows it “possible to prove actual malice. If particular people are shown to have believed something to be false, or to have been highly aware of its probable falsehood, and at the same time they made statements endorsing it on air, they are in play.“You’re allowed to be biased … you’re allowed to try to make money. And people should be able to disagree with each other in a newsroom. But if Fox anchors say they don’t believe X and then turn around and endorse X on air after expressing manifest disbelief in it, they have a real problem.“The actual malice standard is very high and it’s supposed to be … it’s a burden that can be overcome in limited but appropriate circumstances.”The biggest irony revealed by the Dominion filing is that Carlson and colleagues quickly decided the greatest threat to their network was one of the only times it reported an accurate scoop: that Arizona had gone for Biden, at 11.20pm on election night.Four days later, another Murdoch property, the New York Post, asked Trump to stop the stolen election claim. Rupert Murdoch thanked the Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott, for making sure the editorial got wide distribution, according to the Dominion filing.But later that day, as Fox executives realized they were losing viewers, the tide began to shift.“Getting creamed by CNN!” Murdoch messaged Scott.In a message to his producer, Carlson sounded terrified: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”And so on 8 November Maria Bartiromo featured the Trump adviser Sidney Powell and said: “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”That alternate reality would be repeated for months. Perhaps most devastating of all is Dominion’s account of what happened on 12 November, after the reporter Jaqui Heinrich “correctly factchecked [a Trump] tweet, pointing out that top election infrastructure officials said that there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”Carlson was incensed. He messaged Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously what the fuck? Actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”Hannity complained to Scott, who said Heinrich had “serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted”.By the next morning, Heinrich had deleted her tweet.TopicsFox NewsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsUS televisionUS television industryTV newsanalysisReuse this content More

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      Carlson and Hannity among Fox hosts who didn’t believe election fraud claims – court filings

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      Carlson and Hannity among Fox hosts who didn’t believe election fraud claims – court filingsNumber of conservative political commentators expressed doubts about claims being aired on their network Hosts at Fox News did not believe the allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election that were being aired on their programmes by supporters of former president Donald Trump, according to court filings in a $1.6bn (£1.34bn) defamation lawsuit against the network.“Sidney Powell is lying” about having evidence for election fraud, Tucker Carlson wrote in a message on 16 November 2020, according to an excerpt from an exhibit that remains under seal.The internal communication was included in a redacted summary judgment brief filed on Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems.Is Dominion’s $1.6bn defamation lawsuit a death blow for Murdoch and Fox News?Read moreCarlson also referred to Powell in a text as an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell”. Fellow host Laura Ingraham told Carlson that Powell was “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy”, referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani.Sean Hannity, meanwhile, said in a deposition “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second”, according to Dominion’s filing.Dominion, which sells electronic voting hardware and software, is suing Fox News and parent company Fox Corporation. Dominion says some Fox News employees deliberately amplified false claims that Dominion had changed votes in the 2020 election, and that Fox provided a platform for guests to make false and defamatory statements.Attorneys for the cable news station argued in a counterclaim that the lawsuit was an assault on the first amendment. They said Dominion had advanced “novel defamation theories” and was seeking a “staggering” damage figure aimed at generating headlines, chilling protected speech and enriching Dominion’s private equity owner, Staple Street Capital Partners.“Dominion brought this lawsuit to punish FNN for reporting on one of the biggest stories of the day – allegations by the sitting president of the United States and his surrogates that the 2020 election was affected by fraud,” the counterclaim states. “The very fact of those allegations was newsworthy.”Fox attorneys also said Carlson repeatedly questioned Powell’s claims in his broadcasts. “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” Carlson told viewers on 19 November 2020.Fox attorneys say Dominion’s own public relations firm expressed scepticism in December 2020 as to whether the network’s coverage was defamatory. They also point to an email from just days before the election, in which Dominion’s director of product strategy and security complained that the company’s products were “just riddled with bugs”.In their counterclaim, Fox attorneys wrote that when voting technology companies denied the allegations being made by Trump and his surrogates, Fox News aired those denials, while some Fox News hosts offered protected opinion commentary about Trump’s allegations.Fox’s counterclaim is based on New York’s “anti-Slaap” law. Such laws are aimed at protecting people trying to exercise their first amendment rights from being intimidated by “strategic lawsuits against public participation”, or Slapps.“According to Dominion, FNN had a duty not to truthfully report the president’s allegations but to suppress them or denounce them as false,” Fox attorneys wrote. “Dominion is fundamentally mistaken. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be illusory if the prevailing side in a public controversy could sue the press for giving a forum to the losing side.”Fox attorneys warn that threatening the company with a $1.6bn judgment would cause other media outlets to think twice about what they report. They also say documents produced in the lawsuit show Dominion has not suffered any economic harm and do not indicate that it lost any customers as the result of Fox’s election coverage.A trial is set to begin in mid-April.TopicsFox NewsSean HannityFoxUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ex-Twitter execs to testify in Congress on handling of Hunter Biden laptop reporting

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      Ex-Twitter execs to testify in Congress on handling of Hunter Biden laptop reportingCompany temporarily restricted New York Post article in 2020 about contents of the abandoned computer of Joe Biden’s son Former senior staff at Twitter will testify on Wednesday before the House oversight committee about the social media platform’s handling of reporting on Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.The hearing has set the stage for the agenda of a newly Republican-controlled House, underscoring its intention to home in on longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations that big tech has an anti-conservative bias.Republican targeting Hunter Biden says: ‘I don’t target individuals’Read moreThe recently departed Twitter employees set to testify include Vijaya Gadde, the social network’s former chief legal officer, former deputy general counsel James Baker and former head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth.The hearing will center on a question that has long dogged Republicans – why Twitter decided to temporarily restrict the sharing of a story about Hunter Biden in the New York Post, released in October 2020. The Post said it had received a copy of a laptop hard drive from Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter initially blocked people from sharing links to the article for several days, citing concerns over misinformation and spreading a report based on potentially hacked materials.“Americans deserve answers about this attack on the first amendment and why big tech and the Swamp colluded to censor this information about the Biden family selling access for profit,” said the Republican committee chairman James Comer. “Accountability is coming.”At the time, the article was greeted with skepticism due to questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement. Twitter initially said the article had been blocked in keeping with its “hacked materials” policy, which restricted the sharing of unlawfully accessed materials. While it explicitly allowed “reporting on a hack, or sharing press coverage of hacking”, it blocked stories that included “personal and private information – like email addresses and phone numbers”. The platform amended these rules following the Biden controversy.Months later, Twitter’s then CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great”. He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable”.Elon Musk, who purchased the company last year, has since shared a series of internal records showing how the company initially blocked the story from being shared, citing pressure from the Biden administration, among other factors. Republican theories that Democrats are colluding with big tech to suppress conservative speech have become a hot button issue in Washington, with Congress members using various tech hearings to grill executives. But experts say claims of anti-conservative bias have been disproven by independent researchers.“What we’ve seen time and again is that companies are deplatforming people who are spreading racism and conspiracy theories in violation of the company’s rule,” said Jessica J González, co-chief executive officer of the civil rights group Free Press.“The fact that those people are disproportionately Republicans has nothing to do with it,” she added. “This is about right or wrong, not left or right.”Musk’s decision to release information about the laptop story comes after he allowed the return of high-profile figures banned for spreading misinformation and engaging in hate speech, including the former president. The executive has shared and engaged with conspiracy theories on his personal account.The White House has sought to discredit the Republican investigation into Hunter Biden, calling them “divorced-from-reality political stunts”. Nonetheless, Republicans now hold subpoena power in the House, giving them the authority to compel testimony and conduct an aggressive investigation.Online advocacy groups and big tech watchdogs have said the focus on alleged anti-conservative bias from social media firms has served as a distraction from legitimate concerns, delaying the chance for useful legislation to address issues like misinformation, antitrust concerns and online hate speech.“The fact that this is the very first tech hearing of this Congress says something,” González said. “There are real problems facing people across the political spectrum because of big tech, and lack of regulation. But instead we are getting a big waste of time, and a political stunt. The focus of Congress ought to be serving the people who elected them to office.”The Associated Press contributed to this articleTopicsHouse of RepresentativesTwitterHunter BidenRepublicansUS CongressUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Why Donald Trump’s return to Facebook could mark a rocky new age for online discourse

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      Why Donald Trump’s return to Facebook could mark a rocky new age for online discourseThe former president was banned from Instagram and Facebook following the Jan 6 attacks, but Meta argues that new ‘guardrails’ will keep his behaviour in check. Plus: is a chatbot coming for your job?

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      It’s been two years since Donald Trump was banned from Meta, but now he’s back. The company’s justification for allowing the former president to return to Facebook and Instagram – that the threat has subsided – seems to ignore that in the two years since the ban Trump hasn’t changed, it’s just that his reach has reduced.Last week, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, announced that soon Trump will be able to post on Instagram and Facebook. The company said “the risk has sufficiently receded” in the two years since the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021 to allow the ban to be lifted.What you might not have been aware of – except through media reports – was Trump’s response. That is because the former US president posted it on Truth Social, his own social media network that he retreated to after he was banned from the others. And it is effectively behind a wall for web users, because the company is not accepting new registrations. On that platform, Trump is said to have fewer than 5 million followers, compared to 34 million and almost 88 million he’d had on Facebook and Twitter respectively.Meta’s ban meant that Trump wouldn’t have space on its platforms during the US midterms elections in 2022, but would anything have been different if Trump had been given a larger audience? As Dan Milmo has detailed, almost half of the posts on Trump’s Truth Social account in the weeks after the midterms pushed election fraud claims or amplified QAnon accounts or content. But you wouldn’t know it unless you were on that platform, or reading a news report about it like this one.If given a larger audience, will Trump resume his Main Character role in online discourse (a role that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has gamely taken on in the past few months)? Or has his influence diminished? This is the gamble Meta is taking.When Musk lifted Trump’s ban on Twitter in November after a user poll won by a slim margin, it was easy to read the former president’s snub of the gesture as a burn on the tech CEO. But it seems increasingly likely that the Meta decision about whether to reinstate him was looming large in Trump’s mind. Earlier this month, NBC reported that Trump’s advisors had sent a letter to Meta pleading for the ban to be lifted, saying it “dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse”. If Trump had gone back to Twitter and started reposting what he had posted on Truth Social, there would have been more pressure on Meta to keep the ban in place (leaving aside the agreement Trump has with his own social media company that keeps his posts exclusive on Truth Social for several hours).Twitter lifting the ban and Trump not tweeting at all gave Meta sufficient cover.The financialsThere’s also the possible financial reasoning. Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, said Facebook is “a dying platform” and restoring Trump is about clinging to relevance and revenue.For months, Trump has been posting on Truth Social about how poorly Meta is performing financially, and in part trying to link it to him no longer being on Facebook. Meta has lost more than US$80bn in market value, and last year sacked thousands of workers as the company aimed to stem a declining user base and loss of revenue after Apple made privacy changes on its software (£).But what of the ‘guardrails’?Meta’s justification for restoring Trump’s account is that there are new “guardrails” that could result in him being banned again for the most egregious policy breaches for between one month and two years. But that is likely only going to be for the most serious of breaches – such as glorifying those committing violence. Clegg indicated that if Trump is posting QAnon-adjacent content, for example, his reach will be limited on those posts.The ban itself was a pretty sufficient reach limiter, but we will have to see what happens if Trump starts posting again. The unpublished draft document from staff on the January 6 committee, reported by the Washington Post last week, was pretty telling about Meta, and social media companies generally. It states that both Facebook and Twitter, under its former management, were sensitive to claims that conservative political speech was being suppressed. “Fear of reprisal and accusations of censorship from the political right compromised policy, process, and decision-making. This was especially true at Facebook,” the document states.“In one instance, senior leadership intervened personally to prevent rightwing publishers from having their content demoted after receiving too many strikes from independent fact-checkers.“After the election, they debated whether they should change their fact-checking policy on former world leaders to accommodate President Trump.”Those “guardrails” don’t seem particularly reassuring, do they?Is AI really coming for your job?Layoffs continue to hit media and companies are looking to cut costs. So it was disheartening for new reporters in particular to learn that BuzzFeed plans to use AI such as ChatGPT “to create content instead of writers”.(Full disclosure: I worked at BuzzFeed News prior to joining the Guardian in 2019, but it’s been long enough that I am not familiar with any of its thinking about AI.)But perhaps it’s a bit too early to despair. Anyone who has used free AI to produce writing will know it’s OK but not great, so the concern about BuzzFeed dipping its toes in those waters seems to be overstated – at least for now.In an interview with Semafor, BuzzFeed tech reporter Katie Notopoulos explained that the tools aren’t intended to replace the quiz-creation work writers do now, but to create new quizzes unlike what is already around. “On the one hand,” she said, “I want to try to explain this isn’t an evil plan to replace me with AI. But on the other … maybe let Wall Street believe that for a little while.”That seems to be where AI is now: not a replacement for a skilled person, just a tool.The wider TechScape
      This is the first really good in-depth look at the last few months of Twitter since Elon Musk took over.
      Social media users are posting feelgood footage of strangers to build a following, but not every subject appreciates the clickbaity attention of these so-called #kindness videos.
      If you’re an influencer in Australia and you’re not declaring your sponcon properly, you might be targeted as part of a review by the local regulator.
      Speaking of influencers, Time has a good explanation for why you might have seen people posting about mascara on TikTok in the past few days.
      Writer Jason Okundaye makes the case that it’s time for people to stop filming strangers in public and uploading the videos online in the hope of going viral.
      Nintendo rereleasing GoldenEye007 this week is a reminder of how much the N64 game shaped video games back in the day.
      TopicsTechnologyTechScapeSocial mediaDonald TrumpDigital mediaMetaFacebookInstagramnewslettersReuse this content More

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      Donald Trump sues Bob Woodward over The Trump Tapes for $50m

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      Donald Trump sues Bob Woodward over The Trump Tapes for $50mFormer president claims Washington Post reporter ‘never got his permission to release these tapes’ Donald Trump has sued Bob Woodward for a fraction less than $50m, claiming he did not agree to the veteran Washington Post reporter publishing tapes of their conversations as an audio book.The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s chilling warning for US democracyRead moreWoodward’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, and its parent company, Paramount Global, were also named as defendants.The Trump Tapes was released in October 2022, under the subtitle Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews With President Donald Trump.Amid generally positive reviews, the Guardian called the audiobook “a passport to the heart of darkness” of Trump’s presidency.Woodward also wrote three print bestsellers about Trump and his administration: Fear, Rage and Peril – the last cowritten with Robert Costa. The interviews which formed The Trump Tapes were mostly carried out from December 2019 to August 2020, when Woodward was writing Rage.In the suit filed in the northern district of Florida on Monday, lawyers for Trump said their case “centers on Mr Woodward’s systematic usurpation, manipulation and exploitation of audio of President Trump”.They also alleged that one conversation was deceptively edited, citing a comparison with a recording made by Hogan Gidley, a Trump aide, at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on 30 December 2019.That recording, the suit says, contains an exchange in which Woodward tells Trump: “This again is for the book to come out before the election.”Rage was published in the US on 15 September 2020, a little less than two months before election day.Trump is seeking just under $50m in damages, a figure his lawyers say they reached by looking at sales of Fear, which “sold more than two million copies, which is the amount of copies that the audiotape can be estimated to sell.“Based upon the purchase price of the audiotape, $24.99, the damages President Trump has sustained due to the actions of the defendants as set forth herein are estimated to be at least $49,980,000.00, exclusive of punitive damages, attorney’s fees, and costs.”Trump first complained when the audiobook was released. Appearing on CNN, Woodward was asked about Trump’s claim that he “never got his permission to release these tapes”.Woodward said: “Well, they were done voluntarily, it was all on the record. I had used some of it before. So he’s president and … so he’s out there. And this is out there to the tenth power.”Woodward did not immediately comment on Monday. Simon & Schuster and Paramount Global also did not immediately comment.Trump is beginning to accelerate his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, a contest in which he remains the only declared candidate.He faces legal jeopardy on numerous fronts: over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, his financial and campaign finance affairs, his retention of classified records and an allegation of rape by the writer E Jean Carroll, which Trump denies.Trump has often sued media foes, CNN among them. A lawsuit against the New York attorney general was recently thrown out of court.The section of Trump’s suit against Woodward which alleges deceptive editing, meanwhile, contains an echo of the scandal that made the reporter famous: Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon in 1974.In an exchange published in The Trump Tapes, Woodward and Trump discuss Trump’s first impeachment, over his approaches to Ukraine for dirt on political rivals.Trump says the affair was “peanuts” next to Watergate.Woodward says: “But as soon as the Watergate burglars were caught, if Richard Nixon had gone on television and said, ‘You know, I’m the man at the top. I’m indirectly responsible for this. I am sorry. I apologize,’ it would have gone away.”Trump says: “Yeah, Nixon should have done that … But I can’t, I shouldn’t have done that, because I did nothing wrong.”TopicsBob WoodwardDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      TikTok CEO to testify before US Congress next month over data privacy

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      TikTok CEO to testify before US Congress next month over data privacyShou Zi Chew will face legislators amid concerns over the social media app’s alleged collusion with Beijing in accessing user data As the US legislative battle over TikTok continues to escalate, Shou Zi Chew, the chief executive of the video-sharing app, will make his first appearance before Congress to testify next month. Chew will testify before the House energy and commerce committee on 23 March, Republican representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers confirmed in a statement on Monday, as scrutiny of the Chinese-owned app over data privacy concerns grows.TechScape: Is ‘banning’ TikTok protecting users or censorship? It depends who you askRead moreThe news comes after the app was banned on government devices and school campuses in a number of states in recent months, as well as on federal devices after a ban was passed in Congress in December. Next month the House foreign affairs committee plans to hold a vote on a bill aimed at blocking the use of TikTok entirely in the US.“ByteDance-owned TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist party to access American user data,” McMorris Rodgers said, adding that Americans deserve to know how these actions impact their privacy and data security.TikTok has denied these claims, stating: “The Chinese Communist party has neither direct nor indirect control of ByteDance or TikTok,” according to a company spokesman. It confirmed on Monday that Chew will testify.“We welcome the opportunity to set the record straight about TikTok, ByteDance and the commitments we are making to address concerns about US national security before the House committee on energy and commerce,” the spokesman said, adding the company hopes “by sharing details of our comprehensive plans with the full committee, Congress can take a more deliberative approach to the issues at hand”.McMorris Rodgers and other Republican lawmakers have demanded more information from TikTok regarding the app’s impact on young people, concerns about harmful content and details on potential sexual exploitation of minors on the platform.TikTok was first targeted in earnest by the Trump administration in 2020, with a sweeping executive order prohibiting US companies from doing business with ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. In the three years since, the company has sought to assure Washington that the personal data of US citizens cannot be accessed and its content cannot be manipulated by China’s Communist party or anyone else under Beijing’s influence.While Biden revoked the Trump administration ban in June 2021, the reversal was made with a stipulation that the US committee on foreign investment (CFIUS) conduct a security review of the platform and suggested a path forward to avoid a permanent ban.That review has been ongoing as the CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks for more than two years aiming to reach a national security agreement to protect the data of US TikTok users. The White House on Friday declined to comment on whether it would support a legislative ban on TikTok or the status of the talks.Reuters contributed to this articleTopicsTikTokUS CongressSocial mediaDigital mediaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden vows to veto Republican plans that threaten economic ‘chaos’ – as it happened

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      “They’re threatening to have us default on the American debt, the debt that has been accumulated for over 230 years … we’ve never ever done that,” Biden said, referring to fiscal policies proposed by Republicans.“Why in God’s name would Americans give up the progress we made for the chaos they’re suggesting? I don’t get it … I will not let that happen, not on my watch,” he said.“I will veto everything they send,” he added.It’s slightly past 4pm in Washington DC. Here’s where things stand:
      Former transportation secretary Elaine Chao has spoken out against former president Donald Trump who has repeatedly issued racist remarks towards her. Chao, who is Asian American, told Politico, “When I was young, some people deliberately misspelled or mispronounced my name…He doesn’t seem to understand that, which says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans,” she added.
      In an address in Springfield, Virginia on Thursday, president Joe Biden hit back against Republican fiscal policies and vowed to not let a national debt default happen. “They’re threatening to have us default on the American debt, the debt that has been accumulated for over 230 years … we’ve never ever done that…Why in God’s name would Americans give up the progress we made for the chaos they’re suggesting? I don’t get it … I will not let that happen, not on my watch,” he said.
      Biden also reaffirmed his administration’s fight against global warming by “finally making sure the biggest corporations just begin to pay a little bit. The days are over where corporations pay zero in federal taxes.”
      San Francisco superior court judge Stephen Murphy has ordered footage of the attack on former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband to be released. In addition to home surveillance footage, Murphy ordered the public release of police body camera footage, 911 audio calls, as well as audio from police interviews with David DePape, the suspect who broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home last October in attempts to kidnap the former speaker.
      Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for a change in leadership of the Republican National Committee in an interview on Thursday morning. “I think we need a change, and I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC. I like what Harmeet Dhillon has said about getting the RNC outside of DC – why would you want to have your headquarters in the most Democrat city in America?,” DeSantis said on the Charlie Kirk Show, referring to the lawyer who is currently the foremost challenger of RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s position.
      The National Archives has officially requested that former US presidents and their vice presidents check to establish whether they have any classified documents or other presidential records. The request comes amid the ongoing but increasingly surreal scandal tangling up Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Mike Pence.
      Hard right congresswoman and conspiracy-booster Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, has “no chance” of being stated-2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump’s vice presidential choice, despite aspiring to it, a source tells Guardian US.
      Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s owner, is reportedly ready to allow Trump to post on the platforms his ongoing attacks on the results of the 2020 presidential election, where he lost to Joe Biden but claims he really won. But if Trump posts misinformation about upcoming elections, including the 2024 presidential, it will take some unspecified action to restrict his messaging. Meta has reinstated Trump to the platforms after a two-year ban, but he hasn’t posted yet.
      The decision to allow Trump back onto Facebook and Instagram is infuriating many, including some civil rights groups (though not the ACLU) and Democratic politicians. The move has been called dangerous by some.
      That’s it from me, Maya Yang, as we wrap up today’s US politics blog. Thank you for following along. We’ll be back on Friday. Former transportation secretary Elaine Chao has spoken out against former president Donald Trump who has repeatedly issued racist remarks towards her. Chao, who is Asian American, told Politico, “When I was young, some people deliberately misspelled or mispronounced my name… Asian Americans have worked hard to change that experience for the next generation.”“He doesn’t seem to understand that, which says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans,” she added. Earlier this week, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Does Coco Chow have anything to do with Joe Biden’s Classified Documents being sent and stored in Chinatown?” he wrote. “Her husband, the Old Broken Crow, is VERY close to Biden, the Democrats, and, of course, China,” he added. Trump has also previously referred to Chao, who is married to Mitch McConnell, as “China’s loving wife.”“We have more work to do but we’re on the right track… I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future than I am today…and nothing is beyond our capacity if we work together,” said Biden in his closing remarks. “Unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 50 years,” said Biden since taking office two years ago. “We created nearly 11 million jobs, including 750,000 manufacturing jobs…the unemployment rate is near record lowest for Black and Hispanic workers and the lowest ever recorded for people with disabilities,” he added.“If you don’t think we have a climate crisis, come travel with me around the country,” says Biden, adding, “We have enormous drought, now we have these super storms in the west…folks, there is a thing called global warming and it’s real but we can do something about it.”“Families are going to save more than $1,000 on tax credits on these [energy efficient] vehicles when they purchase one, and energy efficient appliances like refrigerators and washing machines…and we’re paying for all of this by finally making sure the biggest corporations just begin to pay a little bit. The days are over where corporations pay zero in federal taxes,” he added. “They’re threatening to have us default on the American debt, the debt that has been accumulated for over 230 years … we’ve never ever done that,” Biden said, referring to fiscal policies proposed by Republicans.“Why in God’s name would Americans give up the progress we made for the chaos they’re suggesting? I don’t get it … I will not let that happen, not on my watch,” he said.“I will veto everything they send,” he added.“We’re moving in the right direction, now we have to protect those gains…from the MAGA Republicans… This ain’t your father’s Republican party… They want to pass legislation to do the following things…they want to raise your gas prices…cut taxes of your billionaires…and they want to impose a 30% national sales tax on food…clothing…house, cars… They want to eliminate the income tax system,” Biden said. “We’ve achieved a lot…economic growth is up, stronger than experts expected…jobs are the highest in American history and wages are up. In the past six months, inflation has gone down each month,” Biden said in his address at Springfield, Virginia. San Francisco superior court judge Stephen Murphy has ordered footage of the attack on former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband to be released. In addition to home surveillance footage, Murphy ordered the public release of police body camera footage, 911 audio calls, as well as audio from police interviews with David DePape, the suspect who broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home last October in attempts to kidnap the former speaker.Unable to find Nancy Pelosi, the alleged perpetrator instead beat her 82-year old husband with a hammer. Murphy’s decision comes amid calls from numerous news agencies that seek the release of the footage and evidence. “You don’t eliminate the public right of access just because of concerns about conspiracy theories,” said Thomas Burke, a lawyer who represented the Associated Press and other media organizations in their attempt to gain access to the footage, the AP reports. Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for a change in leadership of the Republican National Committee in an interview on Thursday morning. .css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}“I think we need a change, and I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC. I like what Harmeet Dhillon has said about getting the RNC outside of DC – why would you want to have your headquarters in the most Democrat city in America?,” DeSantis said on the Charlie Kirk Show, referring to the lawyer who is currently the foremost challenger of RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s position. He added: .css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}“We’ve had three substandard election cycles in a row – ’18, ’20, and ’22 – and I would say of all three of those, ’22 was probably the worst given the political environment of a very unpopular President in Biden.”DeSantis’s comments come amid growing concerns from some RNC members that McDaniel has not done enough to push back against Donald Trump from forming a third political party if he does not secure the Republican presidential nomination during the next election cycle. Hello again, US politics live blog readers. It’s been a lively day in the news from Washington so far and there’ll be more to come. Joe Biden is due to leave the White House shortly en route to a union office in Springfield, Virginia, where he’s scheduled to give a speech at 2.45pm ET on the economy (and what he sees as Republican plans to block his economic agenda).Here’s where things stand:
      The National Archives has officially requested that former US presidents and their vice presidents check to establish whether they have any classified documents or other presidential records, amid the ongoing but increasingly surreal scandal tangling up Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Mike Pence.
      Hard right congresswoman and conspiracy-booster Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, has “no chance” of being stated-2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump’s vice presidential choice, despite aspiring to it, a source tells Guardian US.
      Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s owner, is reportedly ready to allow Trump to post on the platforms his ongoing attacks on the results of the 2020 presidential election, where he lost to Joe Biden but claims he really won. But if Trump posts misinformation about upcoming elections, including the 2024 presidential, it will take some unspecified action to restrict his messaging. Meta has reinstated Trump to the platforms after a two-year ban, but he hasn’t posted yet.
      The decision to allow Trump back onto Facebook and Instagram is infuriating many, including some civil rights groups (though not the ACLU) and Democratic politicians. The move has been called dangerous by some.
      At a press briefing with the US attorney general Merrick Garland earlier, FBI director Christopher Wray warned, amid the scandal of classified documents turning up in the possession of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, that people with access to such material should be more “conscious of the rules.”“Obviously I can’t comment on any specific investigation, but we have had, for quite a number of years, any number of mishandling investigations,” Wray told reporters at the briefing that was chiefly called to talk about the Department of Justice seizing a website used by a ransomware outfit.“That is, unfortunately, a regular part of our counterintelligence division, counterintelligence programs work,” Wray added. “And people need to be conscious of the rules for classified information and appropriate handling of it. Those rules are there for a reason,” Wray said.Today FBI Director Christopher Wray weighed in on the classified doc drama, I believe for the first time, saying in part, “people need to be conscious of the rules regarding classified information and appropriate, handling of them…those rules are there for a reason.”— Evan Lambert (@EvanLambertTV) January 26, 2023
      It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at this point. But, again, there is a vast difference between what appears to be a careless oversight by Joe Biden, followed by an infuriating and outrageous information blackout before the public were told, and the case of Trump, who refused to hand over boxes of classified and secret documents to the government after leaving the White House and had to be raided by the FBI last summer.The National Archives has officially requested that former US presidents and their vice presidents do a sweep or a re-sweep, if they’ve checked before, to establish whether they have any classified documents or other presidential records among their personal records, amid the rumbling scandal, CNN reports. The call comes as Donald Trump is being investigated by a special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice (DoJ) for withholding many boxes of material, including top secret documents, Joe Biden is being investigated by a separate special counsel after it was discovered that there were a few classified documents outstanding from his time as vice president, which he’s handed over, and that Mike Pence had some documents, too.The National Archives and Records Administration is an independent federal agency within the executive branch. The agency sent a letter today to representatives of former presidents and vice presidents from, according to CNN, the last six administrations covered by the Presidential Records Act (PRA).“The letter, which was reviewed by CNN, requests that they check their files to ensure that material thought to be personal does not “inadvertently” contain presidential records that are required by law to be turned over to the Archives,” the cable news channel reports.The report continues: “The Archives sent the letter to representatives for former Presidents Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, and former Vice Presidents Pence, Biden, Dick Cheney, Al Gore and Dan Quayle.Representatives for the four former presidents have all so far told CNN they do not have any classified records in their possession.”Here again, FYI, is the Guardian’s great explainer on the fundamental differences between the Trump and Biden cases.Obama, Dubya, Clinton, Cheney, Gore, Quayle (and president Jimmy Carter, aged 98, who hasn’t been mentioned in this latest sweep), are still alive.NBC News made a splash on Wednesday with a report that said Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to be Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president in 2024.Greene, from Georgia, is a far-right controversialist and conspiracy theorist who was barred from House committees by Democrats but is now suddenly strongly allied with Republican leaders, after supporting Kevin McCarthy through his 15-vote ordeal to be elected speaker.Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist, now a far-right media figure (and accused fraudster), told NBC Greene saw herself “on the short list for Trump’s VP”.An unnamed source “who has advised Greene said her ‘whole vision is to be vice president’.”So the Guardian asked its own anonymous source, a veteran Trumpworld insider, if there was any chance Trump would pick Greene.The source said: “No chance. She might want it but it’s not real.”So there’s that.There’s also this, an interview with Robert Draper of the New York Times about his fascinating book about Republican dysfunction and, in particular, the rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene:‘A nutso proposition’: Robert Draper on Trump, Republicans and January 6 Read moreThe Guardian’s David Smith earlier this month ran through some of Trump’s options in the veepstakes, including Taylor Greene. You can read it here. More