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      Taiwan, on China’s Doorstep, Is Dealing With TikTok Its Own Way

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      The island democracy was early to ban TikTok on government phones, and the ruling party refuses to use it. But a U.S.-style ban is not under consideration.As it is in the United States, TikTok is popular in Taiwan, used by a quarter of the island’s 23 million residents.People post videos of themselves shopping for trendy clothes, dressing up as video game characters and playing pranks on their roommates. Influencers share their choreographed dances and debate whether the sticky rice dumplings are better in Taiwan’s north or south.Taiwanese users of TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, are also served the kind of pro-China content that the U.S. Congress cited as a reason it passed a law that could result in a ban of TikTok in America.One recent example is a video showing a Republican congressman, Rob Wittman of Virginia, stoking fears that a vote for the ruling party in Taiwan’s January election would prompt a flood of American weapons to aid the island democracy in a possible conflict with China, which claims it as part of its territory. The video was flagged as fake by a fact-checking organization, and TikTok took it down.About 80 miles from China’s coast, Taiwan is particularly exposed to the possibility of TikTok’s being used as a source of geopolitical propaganda. Taiwan has been bombarded with digital disinformation for decades, much of it traced back to China.But unlike Congress, the government in Taiwan is not contemplating legislation that could end in a ban of TikTok.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Honey, I Love You. Didn’t You See My Slack About It?

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      Some couples are using professional project-management software to maintain their relationships. Why does it bother other people?Ben Lang didn’t expect to get so much hate just for being organized. For the past three years, he and his wife, Karen-Lynn Amouyal, have been using Notion, a popular software tool, to optimize their household and relationship. His version of the tool, commonly used by businesses to manage complex projects, functions like a souped-up Google Doc, with sections for a grocery list, to-do lists and details of upcoming trips.More unusual is a section Mr. Lang, a venture capital investor who previously worked at Notion, created about principles (“what’s important to us as a couple”). Another section, called “Learnings,” outlines things the couple have discovered about each other, such as their love languages and Myers-Briggs test results. There’s a list of friends they want to set up on dates. They also maintain a log of memories from their date nights. Mr. Lang, 30, was so proud of the creation that last month, he started promoting a template of the setup to others. “My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our day-to-day life,” he wrote on X. “I turned this into a template, let me know if you’d like to see it!”The internet responded with a venomous outrage. “People have told me my wife is cheating on me, people have told me I have a dead body in my basement, people have told me I’m autistic,” he said.But his approach isn’t entirely unusual, especially among people who work in the tech industry and want to manage their personal lives the same way they manage their professional lives. For a class of young workers, it’s only rational to apply the tools of the corporate world to their relationships and families. Businesses have goals and systems for achieving them, the thinking goes. They get things done.Anastasia Alt, 35, uses Kanban boards — a visual tracking system where tasks progress from left to right — in Trello, a project management tool, for “literally everything.” This includes work at Yana Sleep, her e-commerce start-up, but also planning trips and events with her partner. The two of them also have a dedicated Slack work space, named after a mash-up of their surnames with a logo created using the artificial intelligence software Midjourney. She acknowledged, in jest, that some of her systems were “a little psychopathic,” but said she’s always been an optimizer.Ms. Alt said the Slack work space has emotional benefits for her relationship, too: freeing up their text messages and in-person conversations for the fun stuff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pro-Trump PAC Joins TikTok Amid Fight Over Its Chinese Ownership

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      The main political action committee backing former President Donald J. Trump joined TikTok on Wednesday, jumping onto the popular social media platform while it is at the center of a political battle over its ownership by a Chinese corporation, ByteDance.The super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., is independent of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, but the move to TikTok — using the handle @MAGA — signals a shift in strategy nearly three months after President Biden’s re-election campaign joined the social media platform.“There’s millions of voters on TikTok, and @MAGA will deliver President Donald J. Trump’s pro-freedom, pro-America agenda every day with the facts and stories that matter,” Taylor Budowich, the chief executive of the PAC, said in a statement. “We aren’t trying to set policy, we are trying to win an election.”The TikTok account, which had about 300 followers as of Wednesday evening, has posted five videos so far, four attacking Mr. Biden and one attacking Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, as a “radical leftist.”Mr. Biden signed a law in April that would force a sale of TikTok by ByteDance, which sued the federal government on Tuesday in an effort to block the law. Under the terms of the law, ByteDance has about nine months to sell the app or it will be banned in the United States. The president can extend that time frame to a year.Mr. Trump had also tried to ban the app during his term, ordering ByteDance in August 2020 to divest the app. A federal judge blocked the attempted ban the next month, and Mr. Trump left office a few months later.But when House Republicans moved to force the sale of the app via legislation, Mr. Trump came out against the bill, saying that ByteDance’s ownership was still a national security threat but that a potential ban would anger young Americans.“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on CNBC. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”Mr. Trump himself is not on TikTok — preferring to use his own social media site, Truth Social — and neither is his campaign. With TikTok still operating in the United States, for now, and with Mr. Biden’s campaign using the app, Mr. Budowich said that Mr. Trump’s message should be “brought to every corner of the internet.”“We will not cede any platform to Joe Biden and the Democrats,” he said. More

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      Beeper Messaging App Is Acquired as a Bet on a Regulatory Shift

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      Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, bought Beeper in an effort to build a system that works across Android and Apple devices.Beeper, the app that brought iPhone messaging features to Android smartphones, has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to support the development of a single service for sending and receiving chats from WhatsApp, Signal, LinkedIn and others.The deal, which is valued at about $125 million, was announced on Tuesday. It comes as regulators in Europe and the United States pressure the biggest tech companies to open their messaging services to third parties. Regulators believe doing so will make it easier for people to communicate with friends and family and to switch messaging providers.Automattic is betting that the changing regulatory environment will make people more interested in finding a unified messaging system like Beeper, said Toni Schneider, Automattic’s interim chief executive.Beeper is Automattic’s second messaging service acquisition. Last year, it bought Texts, an iPhone app that brings together messages from Instagram, iMessage and others. Mr. Schneider said Beeper and Texts employees would combine their systems into a single app that worked on iPhones and Android smartphones as well as computers.“Everyone has this problem where they say, ‘I know I had this conversation with this person, but I can’t remember where,’” Mr. Schneider said. “We think we can innovate a lot in this space.”Eric Migicovsky, who co-founded Beeper in 2020, said Beeper and Texts would deliver their combined service this year. The teams that built those companies will meet in two weeks in Portugal to begin that process.“The real thing we have been competing against was apathy about new experiences in chat,” Mr. Migicovsky said.Last year, Beeper released an app that offered Android phone users the ability to send encrypted messages and high-resolution videos to iPhones. The app added more than 100,000 users in three days before Apple blocked it by changing its iMessage system.Though a Justice Department lawsuit accusing Apple of maintaining an iPhone monopoly did not refer specifically to Beeper, the problems highlighted by Beeper’s conflict with Apple were mentioned in the complaint, which was filed in March. The department faulted Apple for making “iPhone users less secure than they would otherwise be” by “rejecting solutions” for smartphone messaging like those provided by Beeper.Beeper will soon be open to anyone who wants to download it after a testing period that limited the app to about 100,000 users, Mr. Migicovsky said. The company had 466,000 people on a waiting list. About 60 percent of its users are on Android smartphones.Automattic was an early investor in Beeper, which had raised $16 million from investors that included Y Combinator and Initialized Capital, Mr. Migicovsky said. Last week, Beeper’s 27 employees officially began work at their new company. More

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      The U.S. Investors Caught in the Scrum Over TikTok

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      Major U.S. investment firms such as General Atlantic, Susquehanna and Sequoia Capital own stakes in ByteDance, the parent of TikTok. Their investments are increasingly under fire.For years, the U.S. investors who backed ByteDance, the Chinese internet company that owns TikTok, have wrestled with the complexities of owning a piece of a geopolitically fraught social media app.Now it’s gotten even more complicated.A bill to force ByteDance to sell TikTok is winding its way through the Senate after sailing through the House this month. Questions about whether TikTok’s Chinese ties make it a national security threat are mounting. And U.S. investors including General Atlantic, Susquehanna International Group and Sequoia Capital — which collectively poured billions into ByteDance — are facing increased pressure from state and federal lawmakers to answer for their investments in Chinese companies.Last year, a House committee began examining U.S. investments in Chinese companies. The Biden administration has curbed U.S. investments in China. In December, a Missouri pension board voted to divest from some Chinese investments, following political pressure from the state treasurer. And Florida passed legislation this month to require the state’s Board of Administration to sell off its stakes in China-owned companies.All of this comes on top of existing issues with owning a piece of ByteDance. The Beijing-based company has grown into one of the world’s most highly valued start-ups, worth $225 billion, according to CB Insights. That’s a boon, at least on paper, for U.S. investors who put money into ByteDance when it was a smaller company.Yet in reality, these investors have an illiquid investment that is hard to spin into gold. Since ByteDance is privately held, investors cannot simply sell their stakes in it. A confluence of politics and economics means ByteDance is also unlikely to go public soon, which would enable its shares to trade.Even if a sale of TikTok was easy to pull off, the Chinese government appears reluctant to relinquish control of an influential social media company. Beijing moved to stop a deal for TikTok to American buyers a few years ago and recently condemned the congressional bill that mandates ByteDance divest the app.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside Amira Yahyaoui’s Claims about Mos, a Student Aid Start-Up

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      Amira Yahyaoui, a human rights activist, promoted the success of her student aid start-up, Mos. Some of her statements do not add up, according to internal data and people familiar with the company.As a Tunisian human rights activist in the 2000s, Amira Yahyaoui staged protests and blogged about government corruption. In interviews, she described being beaten by police. When she was 18, she said, she was kidnapped from the street, dropped off at the Algerian border and placed in exile for several years.Ms. Yahyaoui’s compelling background helped her stand out among entrepreneurs when she moved in 2018 to San Francisco, where she founded a student aid start-up called Mos. The app hit the top of Apple’s App Store and Ms. Yahyaoui raised $56 million from high-profile investors, including Sequoia Capital, John Doerr and Steph Curry, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups. Mos was valued at $400 million.In podcasts, TV interviews and other media, Ms. Yahyaoui, 39, frequently discussed Mos’s success.Among other things, she said the start-up had helped 400,000 students get financial aid. But internal company data viewed by The New York Times showed that as of early last year, only about 30,000 customers had paid for Mos’s student aid services. The rest of the 400,000 users included anyone who had signed up for a free account and may have gotten an email about applying for student aid, two people familiar with the situation said.After Mos expanded into online banking in September 2021, Ms. Yahyaoui told publications such as TechCrunch that the company had more than 100,000 bank accounts. But those accounts had very small amounts of money in them, according to the internal data. Less than 10 percent of Mos’s roughly 153,000 bank users had put their own money into their accounts, the data showed.Some employees tried to speak up about Ms. Yahyaoui’s claims, said Emi Tabb, who worked at Mos in operations and had roles such as head of financial aid before resigning in late 2022. But Ms. Yahyaoui dismissed and sometimes disparaged employees who tried pushing back against her public comments, five people who witnessed the incidents said.“She created a culture of fear,” Mx. Tabb said.Mos is among a class of tech start-ups that rose during the fast money era of the late 2010s and early in the pandemic, when young companies landed millions of dollars in funding with little more than promises. Now as the money has dried up and many tech start-ups grapple with a downturn, investors are pickier, customers are warier of bold claims and employees are more suspicious of founder pronouncements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Sues Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly

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      The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $3 trillion public company.The Justice Department and 16 state attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday, the federal government’s most significant challenge to the reach and influence of the company that has put iPhones in the hands of more than a billion people.The government argued that Apple violated antitrust laws by preventing other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products like its digital wallets, which could diminish the value of the iPhone. Apple’s policies hurt consumers and smaller companies that compete with some of Apple’s services, according to excerpts from the lawsuit released by the government, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.“Each step in Apple’s course of conduct built and reinforced the moat around its smartphone monopoly,” the government said in the lawsuit.The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $2.75 trillion public company that was for years the most valuable on the planet. It takes direct aim at the iPhone, Apple’s most popular device and most powerful business, and attacks the way the company has turned the billions of smartphones it has sold since 2007 into the centerpiece of its empire.By tightly controlling the user experience on iPhones and other devices, Apple has created what critics call an uneven playing field, where it grants its own products and services access to core features that it denies rivals. Over the years, it has limited finance companies’ access to the phone’s payment chip and Bluetooth trackers from tapping into its location-service feature. It’s also easier for users to connect Apple products, like smartwatches and laptops, to the iPhone than to those made by other manufacturers.The company says this makes its iPhones more secure than other smartphones. But app developers and rival device makers say Apple uses its power to crush competition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      TikTok Bill’s Progress Slows in the Senate

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      Legislation to force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app or have it banned in the United States sailed through the House, but the Senate has no plans to move hastily.After a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a nationwide ban sailed through the House at breakneck speed this week, its progress has slowed in the Senate.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader who determines what legislation gets a vote, has not decided whether to bring the bill to the floor, his spokesman said. Senators — some of whom have their own versions of bills targeting TikTok — will need to be convinced. Other legislation on the runway could be prioritized. And the process of taking the House bill and potentially rewriting it to suit the Senate could be time consuming.Many in the Senate are keeping their cards close to their vest about what they would do on the TikTok measure, even as they said they recognized the House had sent a powerful signal with its vote on the bill, which passed 352 to 65. The legislation mandates that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sell its stake in the app within six months or face a ban.“The lesson of the House vote is that this issue is capable of igniting almost spontaneously in the support that it has,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview on Friday. He said that there could be adjustments made to the bill but that there was bipartisan support to wrest the app from Chinese ownership.The slowdown in the Senate means that TikTok is likely to face weeks or even months of uncertainty about its fate in the United States. That could result in continued lobbying, alongside maneuvering by the White House, the Chinese government and ByteDance. It is also likely to prompt potential talks about deals — whether real or imagined — while the uncertainty of losing access to the app will hang over the heads of TikTok creators and its 170 million U.S. users.“Almost everything will slow down in the Senate,” said Nu Wexler, a former Senate aide who worked for Google, Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “They’ll need some time to either massage egos or build consensus.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More