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      Senate votes to ban TikTok on US government-owned devices

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      Senate votes to ban TikTok on US government-owned devicesBill comes after several states barred employees from downloading the app on state-owned gadgets over data concerns The US Senate late on Wednesday passed by voice vote a bill to bar federal employees from using Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok on government-owned devices.The bill must still be approved by the US House of Representatives before going to President Joe Biden for approval. The House of Representatives would need to pass the Senate bill before the current congressional session ends, which is expected next week.The vote is the latest action on the part of US lawmakers to crackdown on Chinese companies amid national security fears that Beijing could use them to spy on Americans.Trump’s bid to ban TikTok and WeChat: where are we now?Read moreThe Senate action comes after North Dakota and Iowa this week joined a growing number of states in banning TikTok, owned by ByteDance, from state-owned devices amid concerns that data could be passed on to the Chinese government.During the last Congress, the Senate in August 2020 unanimously approved legislation to bar TikTok from government devices. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, reintroduced in legislation in 2021.Many federal agencies including the defense, Homeland Security and state departments already ban TikTok from government-owned devices. “TikTok is a major security risk to the United States, and it has no place on government devices,” Hawley said previously.North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds issued directives prohibiting executive branch agencies from downloading the app on any government-issued equipment. Around a dozen US states have taken similar actions, including Alabama and Utah this week.TikTok has said the concerns are largely fueled by misinformation and are happy to meet with policymakers to discuss the company’s practices.“We’re disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States,” the company said Wednesday.Other states taking similar actions include Texas, Maryland and South Dakota.Republican Senator Marco Rubio on Tuesday unveiled bipartisan legislation to ban TikTok altogether in the United States, ratcheting up pressure on ByteDance due to US fears the app could be used to spy on Americans and censure content. Rubio also is a sponsor of Hawley’s TikTok government-device ban bill.The legislation would block all transactions from any social media company in or under the influence of China and Russia, Rubio’s office said.At a hearing last month, FBI Director Chris Wray said TikTok’s US operations raise national security concerns.In 2020, then President Donald Trump attempted to block new users from downloading TikTok and ban other transactions that would have effectively blocked the apps’ use in the United States but lost a series of court battles over the measure.The government’s committee on foreign investment in the United States, a powerful national security body, in 2020 ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok because of the fears that US user data could be passed to the Chinese government, though ByteDance has not done so.CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks for months to reach a national security agreement to protect the data of TikTok’s more than 100 million users but it does not appear any deal will be reached before the end of the year.TopicsUS SenateTikTokHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Five things we know about the collapse of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried

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      ExplainerFive things we know about the collapse of FTX and Sam Bankman-FriedCompany founder was arrested and charged with running a ‘house of cards’ in ‘one of the biggest financial frauds in US history’ It has been another crazy 48 hours in the collapse of FTX, once the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.On Monday, the company’s now-infamous founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested in the Bahamas, a day before he was set to give testimony before Congress. On Tuesday US authorities issued damning charges that the 30-year-old former billionaire ran a “house of cards” and was behind “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history”.Lawmakers went ahead with the hearing without Bankman-Fried, who was otherwise occupied, in what looks set to be a series of heated hearings about the collapse.Here are five things we learned about FTX after two days of whirlwind of events.1. What happened at FTX appears to be ‘old-school fraud’While FTX was billed as a behemoth of cryptocurrency, with all the technical complexities that implies, officials on Tuesday alleged that FTX’s downfall is a classic case of fraud.Republican representative and incoming House finance committee chair Patrick McHenry said in Tuesday’s hearing that FTX appears to be “old school fraud, just using new technology”.In a statement, Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which charged Bankman-Fried of fraud against investors, echoed this sentiment by saying Bankman-Fried “built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto.“FTX operated behind a veneer of legitimacy,” he said. “But we allege in our complaint that the veneer wasn’t just thin, it was fraudulent.”John Ray III, FTX’s current CEO who was brought in to restructure the company, called it “really old-fashioned embezzlement” when testifying in front of the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday.When asked to contrast the liquidation of Enron in the early 2000s, which Ray oversaw, he said the crimes of the former energy giant were “highly orchestrated financial machinations by highly sophisticated people to keep transactions off balance sheets”.FTX, in contrast, was “just taking money from customers, and using it for your own purpose,” he said. “Not sophisticated at all.”2. Little is known about where all the money wentRay told lawmakers that there is an “excess of $7bn” in lost FTX funds from 7.6m accounts, with 2.7m based in the US. It is unclear exactly how much money is lost.“There were no corporate controls, no corporate oversight, no independent board,” he said. “The owners, business and senior management had virtual control of all the accounts and could move money or assets as they desired, undetected by customers.”Ray said he had “never seen such an utter lack of record keeping” and there were “absolutely no internal control whatsoever”. FTX – which helped Bankman-Fried amass a personal fortune once valued at $26bn – used QuickBooks to manage its finances. “QuickBooks, very nice tool, not for a multibillion-dollar company,” Ray said.3. Prosecutors believe Bankman-Fried was lying from the beginningWhile Bankman-Fried built a reputation off his philosophy of effective altruism, saying he wanted to use his wealth to make a major positive impact on the world, prosecutors are alleging that Bankman-Fried was defrauding investors since he founded FTX in 2019.“Bankman-Fried was orchestrating a massive, years-long fraud, diverting billions of dollars of the trading platform’s customer funds for his own personal benefit and to help grow his crypto empire,” the SEC said in its complaint.The complaint describes how Bankman-Fried postured himself as a “responsible leader of the crypto community” and “touted the importance of regulation and accountability”.“But from the start, Bankman-Fried improperly diverted customer assets to his privately-held crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research LLC, and then used those customer funds to make undisclosed venture investments, lavish real estate purchases, and large political donations,” the complaint reads.4. What’s next for Bankman-Fried?The criminal indictment that led to Bankman-Fried’s arrest was unsealed on Tuesday, revealing exactly what charges federal prosecutors have charged him with.Bankman-Fried faces eight criminal counts, including wire fraud on customers and lenders, conspiracies to commit wire fraud on customers and lenders and conspiracies to commit commodities fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.Bankman-Fried could face hefty prison time for the charges but legal experts say it is too early to say yet what sentence he will receive if convicted. Sentencing in white-collar crime is highly influenced by the scale of the fraud, said Duncan Levin, managing partner at Levin & Associates and a former federal prosecutor. Given that FTX’s losses “seem to be close to $2bn, that could drive sentencing to the absolute max,” he said.But at the moment, said Levin, it’s hard to say whether if convicted Bankman-Fried is facing an “Elizabeth Holmes [11 years] or a Bernie Madoff [150 years]”.5. Prosecutors are likely closing in on Bankman-Fried’s inner circle – and the scandal is spreadingThough Bankman-Fried is the only FTX associate who has been charged, US authorities are investigating others who were involved with the company.At a press conference Damian Williams, United States attorney for the southern district of New York, said this was only the beginning. “This investigation is very much ongoing,” he said. “We are not done.” Officials advised anyone involved in the alleged fraud “to come to us before we come to you”.But while US authorities are after FTX insiders, Washington faces its own reckoning. Bankman-Fried and his peers gave millions to politicians of both sides in the hope of steering crypto regulation. The political fallout of FTX’s collapse looks set to be one of the big stories of 2023.TopicsSam Bankman-FriedFTXCryptocurrenciesUS politicsexplainersReuse this content More

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      FTX billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried funneled dark money to Republicans

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      FTX billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried funneled dark money to RepublicansThe crypto entrepreneur was thought to be a big donor to Democrats but now acknowledges he gave equally to GOP The fall of crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has been painted as a big blow to the Democratic party, whose candidates were major beneficiaries of his largesse. But in a new interview, Bankman-Fried has claimed he gave equally large amounts of money to Republicans.“I donated to both parties. I donated about the same amount to both parties,” Bankman-Fried told the crypto commentator and citizen journalist Tiffany Fong.“All my Republican donations were dark,” he said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”Bankman-Fried’s undisclosed donations were made possible by the supreme court’s 2010 decision in the Citizen’s United case, which allowed donors to give anonymously and has led to more than $1bn being poured into federal elections since 2010.The revelation comes as a political battle over the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, is shaping up in Washington.Bankman-Fried was the second-largest donor to Democratic politicians in the last election cycle. The Republican senator Ted Cruz has called FTX “a Bernie Madoff style fraud that cost investors BILLIONS”.“Will Joe Biden and Democrats who cashed Bankman-Fried’s checks give that money to the people SBF screwed?” he wrote on Twitter earlier this month.On Thursday the Senate will hold the first in what is expected to be a series of hearings into FTX’s collapse, with Republicans keen to hold Democrats responsible for a lack of oversight before its collapse.Public data shows that some parts of Bankman-Fried’s empire gave equally to both parties. Data from OpenSecrets, a non-profit that tracks data on campaign finance and lobbying, shows FTX US, the company’s US operation, gave equally to both parties.But Bankman-Fried’s public donations went largely to Democrats. The FTX founder gave more than $990,000 to candidates in the last election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, and another $38.8m to outside groups. Only about $235,000 of his public political giving went toward Republican candidates.The money helped Bankman-Fried position himself as an influential voice in crypto regulation in Washington. In February he testified before the same Senate agricultural committee that will hold the first hearing into FTX’s collapse this Thursday.At the February hearing, Bankman-Fried argued for clarity in regulating the crypto market and outlined “FTX’s key principles for ensuring investor protections.” They included:● Maintaining adequate liquid resources to ensure the platform can return the customer’s assets upon request;● Ensuring the environment where customer assets are custodied, including digital wallets, are kept secure; and● Ensuring appropriate bookkeeping or ledgering of assets and disclosures to protect against misuse or misallocation of customer assets.Bankman-Fried was ousted after the company filed for bankruptcy. The new chief executive, John Ray III, who has overseen some of the biggest bankruptcies ever, including the collapse of the energy giant Enron, said FTX suffered an “unprecedented and complete failure of corporate controls”.According to FTX’s new management, a “substantial portion” of assets held by FTX may be “missing or stolen” and the company did not even keep accurate records of who worked there.TopicsCryptocurrenciesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Elon Musk reinstates Donald Trump’s Twitter account after taking poll

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      Elon Musk reinstates Donald Trump’s Twitter account after taking poll‘The people have spoken,’ says site’s owner, having acknowledged during online poll that automated bots were voting too Elon Musk has reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account after users on the social media platform voted by a slim majority to lift a ban on the former US president.Trump’s account was suspended in 2021 after the January 6 Capitol riot, for violating Twitter guidelines and because of the risk of “further incitement of violence”.The account appeared to be live on Sunday, although the former president had yet to post to the more than 80 million users following him. His last tweet was on 8 January 2021, in which he declared he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the US.Trump did not appear keen to return to Twitter when discussing the issue on Saturday. “I don’t see any reason for it,” the former president said via video when asked about it by a panel at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting.He said he would stick with his new platform Truth Social, developed by his Trump Media and Technology Group startup.Last week, Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and praised Musk, saying he had always liked him. Nevertheless, Trump also said Twitter suffered from bots and fake accounts, and that the problems it faced were “incredible”.Musk, Twitter’s new owner, announced the move after a poll on his own account in which more than 15m votes were cast, with 51.8% in favour of reinstatement.Shortly after taking over Twitter last month, the Tesla CEO had said no decisions would be taken on reinstatement until a newly announced “content moderation council” had met, later adding that no bans would be lifted until there was a “clear process for doing so”.The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated.Vox Populi, Vox Dei. https://t.co/jmkhFuyfkv— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2022
      During the poll, Musk acknowledged that the vote numbers were being affected by automated bots, which are not operated by people, and suggested there was a need to clean up Twitter polls from being influenced by “bot and troll armies”.Bot & troll armies might be running out of steam soon. Some interesting lessons to clean up future polls.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022
      Elon Musk summons Twitter engineers amid mass resignations and puts up poll on Trump banRead moreTwitter banned Trump after the January 6 attack last year, saying his posts were “highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the US Capitol”. Trump was also banned from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube after the riot.The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a leading US civil rights organisation, urged all advertisers still funding Twitter to immediately pause their spending after Trump’s reinstatement.The accounts used by the US rapper Ye – formerly Kanye West – and the British-American former kickboxer Andrew Tate have also been reinstated.Ye’s account was suspended in recent weeks after a series of antisemitic comments prompted Adidas and other companies to cut financial ties with him, costing him his status as a billionaire. He tweeted Sunday: “Testing Testing Seeing if my Twitter is unblocked.”Tate was banned in 2017 for breaching Twitter’s guidelines with extreme misogynistic views, including saying women should “bear some responsibility” for being raped.“Any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all advertising,” said the NAACP’s president, Derrick Johnson. “If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all.”A Republican member of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack said he expected Trump to be as troublesome on Twitter as he was previously if he returns to the platform.“This idea that he’s going to come on and be reformed, everybody knows he won’t,” the committee member, Adam Kinzinger, said.Musk admitted this month that Twitter, which relies on ads for 90% of its revenue, had recorded a “massive drop in revenue” after advertisers stopped booking space on the platform because of concerns that content guidelines would be relaxed.Advertisers were also concerned by the botched relaunch of Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, after impersonators jumped on the offer to be verified by simply paying $7.99 (£7) a month. Omnicom, a media agency whose clients include McDonald’s, Apple and Pepsi, has told companies to pause their Twitter spending because of concerns over brand safety.Yoel Roth, a former head of trust and safety at Twitter who resigned after Musk’s takeover, said in a New York Times op-ed that he quit because it was clear Musk would have unilateral control of content policies. “A Twitter whose policies are defined by unilateral edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development,” Roth wrote.Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist”, first mooted the reinstatement of Trump in May after agreeing a $44bn deal to buy Twitter. He said: “I would reverse the permanent ban,” claiming that Twitter was “left-biased”.This week, Musk reinstated the comedian Kathy Griffin, who had been banned for changing her profile name to “Elon Musk”, which violated his new rule against impersonation without indicating it was a parody account. He has also reinstated Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and author, who was suspended from Twitter after violating the platform’s content policies with a tweet about the transgender actor Elliot Page.Imran Ahmed, CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, a campaign group, said the reinstatements had made Musk’s intent for Twitter “crystal clear”.“He is sending a clear message to users and to advertisers that brand safety and an inclusive space for all users is no longer the aim for Twitter. Instead he is turning Twitter into the home for extreme and fringe voices who have been rightly shunned by other platforms,” said Ahmed.On Friday, Musk announced a new content policy of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”, stating that “negative/hate” tweets would be “deboosted” and no adverts would appear near them.New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
      Also on Friday, Twitter temporarily closed its offices after an unspecified number of staff quit the company after an ultimatum from Musk that they should commit to “being hardcore” or leave. According to the New York Times, 1,200 of Twitter’s remaining 3,750 workers – a workforce that had already been halved in size after Musk’s takeover – left the business last week.TopicsTwitterDonald TrumpElon MuskUS politicsRepublicansSocial mediaDigital medianewsReuse this content More

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      Inside the unhinged midterm election conspiracy theories on Truth Social

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      Inside the unhinged midterm election conspiracy theories on Truth Social Stuffed ballot boxes, ‘BlueAnon’, support for Russia and ‘corporate communists’ are catnip on the rightwing platform Ballot boxes being stuffed. “BlueAnon”. Men in underpants. Every Democratic candidate: a “complete weirdo psychopath”.To dive into Truth Social, Donald Trump’s Twitter-but-for-conspiracy-theorists social media platform, is to enter a world where all of the above are real topics of debate, breathlessly discussed by Trump-backing Republicans and anonymous rightwing provocateurs.Twitter sued by former staff as Elon Musk begins mass sackingsRead moreTruth Social has always been a platform for lies and obfuscations; about the 2020 election, the Democratic party, vaccines, Hunter Biden. But with less than a week before the election, the platform and its users have become even more unhinged.The site, formed as Trump’s alternative to Twitter after he was banned from that platform in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, is awash with false theories about how the Democratic party is attempting to manipulate the midterm vote, false claims about the attack on Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and false accusations about Democratic candidates themselves.As one of the most followed Truth Social users, Donald Trump Jr, son of the former US president, has been one of the most prominent agitators.In the run-up to the election, Trump Jr has used the platform to echo rightwing talking points about vaccines, drugs, Ukraine and a host of other issues. His posts are eagerly lapped up by fellow Truthers, and he isn’t the only thought leader on the platform.The unusually named Catturd2 has emerged as one of Truth Social’s tastemakers since the site launched, and with more than 760,000 followers – Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority speaker has only 54,000 and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s on-off friend and lawyer, has 89,000 – when Catturd2 speaks, people listen.In recent days Catturd2 has mostly chosen to speak about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Like numerous other Truth Social users, Catturd2 has their doubts and has echoed a rightwing, homophobic, incorrect conspiracy theory about the attack – an idea Trump Jr also peddled on Truth Social.But Catturd2 has other thoughts, too, including on the Democrats running for election in the midterm elections.“Every single Democrat candidate is a complete weirdo psychopath,” Catturd2 wrote recently, in a truth that was liked by more than 6,000 accounts, and which largely captures the attitude of Truth Social users toward Democratic politicians and their supporters.Truth Social launched, chaotically, in February 2022. Billed as “a major new platform” where Republicans and Democrats alike could converse in an environment free from the “censorship” of big tech – an environment with an “ironclad commitment to protecting vigorous debate” – thousands of would-be users were unable to access the service for weeks, and Trump himself was said to be furious with the platform.Trump had planned a $1.3bn merger of Truth Social with Digital World Acquisition Corp, a blank check company, but the deal has been plagued by delays and is under federal investigation. In October it emerged that the co-founder of Trump’s social media company had told the US Securities and Exchange Commission that the company’s efforts to raise $1bn were based on “fraudulent misrepresentations … in violation of federal securities laws”.Still, Truth Social has managed to grow in popularity, with its number of users surging past other rightwing platforms like Gab, Parler and Gettr. Even if Truth Social’s 1.7m US unique visitors a month is dwarfed by Twitter and Facebook, it has become the go-to meeting place for Trump supporters to voice unsubstantiated concerns about voter fraud.As the election looms, ballot “drop boxes” have become the particular bete noire for the rightwing crowd. Introduced so that people can drop off their early voting or absentee ballots, to Truth Social users these drop boxes are nothing more than election fraud in plain sight – flimsy, poorly guarded containers where Democratic backers or members of the deep state regularly stop off to jam hundreds of fraudulent ballots into the counting system.On Truth Social, people have been called to action.“Get out and help patriots. Watch those ballot drop boxes. We can’t let them steal another election,” msannthrope wrote, in a post similar to hundreds of others on the platform.In fact, on Tuesday a judge issued a restraining order against a rightwing group in Arizona which had deployed people to watch over drop boxes, after accusations of voter intimidation, but the obsession with the boxes hasn’t gone away.Thousands of users posted a link this week to a story from a rightwing website which alleged irregularities at ballot drop boxes in Pennsylvania, a state which Trump and his supporters have accused of seeing fraud in 2020. Politifact, a non-partisan fact-checking website, reported that people had “successfully inserted 18 ballots into three of the eight ballot drop boxes in Centre County, Pennsylvania, before the official window of time when the boxes were open to receive ballots”.But, Politifact wrote: “The ballots are not evidence of fraud. The voters simply didn’t follow directions,” while Michael Pipe, the county’s commission chair and chair of its election board, told local news station KDKA-TV. The ballots will not count towards the Pennsylvania vote, Pipe said, because they were returned incorrectly.If misinformation is king on Truth Social, then that might explain how Marjorie Taylor Greene, a darling of the Trump-Republican movement who is known for both extremism and incompetence, has become one of the loudest voices in what is a very loud room.Throughout October, her account has been a flurry of vague assertions about the Democratic party: half-baked off ideas and theories tossed off apropos of nothing, without explanation or justification.“There are more Democrat conspiracy theories & theorists on Twitter than Qanon ever produced,” Taylor Greene wrote on October 28.“Most have blue check marks, post their pronouns, support war in Ukraine, are triple vaxxed & boosted, and work in corporate media, Hollywood, or the government.“Blueanon [an apparent play on the rightwing QAnon conspiracy theory] is dangerous.”It wasn’t clear – because she didn’t say – what had set Taylor Greene off. But she clearly enjoyed this foreboding, dystopian style, because the next day, she was back at it.“Corporate communists control the speech of their employees & customers by only allowing Democrat speech and punishing, silencing, and canceling Republican speech,” Taylor Greene said.If it was unclear how the concept of a corporate communist would actually work, then it was also unclear what Taylor Greene meant by her grimly threatening follow up: “But there is a shift beginning,” she wrote. “People are beginning to refuse to be silenced and a Patriot economy is beginning.”Perhaps the real motivation for these posts is simply that people on Truth Social love stuff like this. Truth Social is, according to its bosses, a platform where anyone is free to say whatever they want, but what they mostly want to say is that they don’t have anywhere to speak.“Why are people being censored for misleading or false information and not the biggest offenders, the media?” user mikesonfire pondered obliquely this month.Mikesonfire’s other posts have included a suggestion that the military, not “biased clerks” count votes, and that: “Russia invaded the Ukraine to stop the NWO [New World Order, a conspiracy theory which states a cabal of elites is striving for a world government] for producing more viral weapons”.Russia has been a particular fascination for Truth Social users, many of whom have spoken sympathetically about the country and its invasion of Ukraine. Other users have posted approvingly about a Russian government plan to ban people from suggesting homosexual relationships are “normal”, and the hashtag IStandWithRussia has been used repeatedly over the past month.In recent days, despite users’ apparent satisfaction with Truth Social, the main interest has been Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and how it might impact the Democratic party in elections and beyond.Musk’s vague promise to overturn Twitter bans has had people giddy with excitement, claiming it could open the door to a glorious era of Republican reign.“Democrats are not going to be able to handle free speech and the corrupt Democratic Party will fall apart after hearing the truth,” one Truth Social user gravely intoned after Musk purchased Twitter.Another posted: “3 PATRIOTS🇺🇸 TRUMP, MUSK, & [Steve] BANNON,” above a photoshopped picture of the three men. Others “truthed” photos of Musk entering the Twitter HQ, and reveled in the departure of Twitter employees.Troublingly for Trump and Truth Social, however, the most striking response from Truth Social users was the large number of them pleading with Musk to be allowed to return to Twitter.For now, Truth Social might be the platform of choice for those loyal to Trump and his election lies, but it seems large numbers of the platform can’t wait to get away.TopicsDonald TrumpElon MuskSteve BannonUS politicsSocial mediaNancy PelosiRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disaster

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      Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disasterInternal chaos at the company – and the decimation of its staff – has created ideal conditions for falsehoods and hateful content The mass layoffs at Twitter that diminished several teams, including staff on the company’s safety and misinformation teams, could spell disaster during the US midterm elections next week, experts have warned. The company has laid off around 50% of its workforce, according to news reports; a figure that Musk and others have not disputed, amounting to an estimated 3,700 people.The internal chaos unfolding at Twitter, in addition to a sudden lack of staff and resources dedicated to counteracting misinformation, has created ideal conditions for election misinformation to thrive, said Paul Barrett, an expert in disinformation and fake news at New York University.What changes has Elon Musk made at Twitter and what might he do next?Read more“Twitter is in the midst of a category 5 hurricane, and that is not a good environment for fostering vigilance when dealing with inevitable attempts to spread falsehoods and hateful content on a very influential platform,” he said.Elon Musk and other senior figures have sought to re-assure the public. Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, said in a tweet on Friday that the layoffs affected “approximately 15%” of the trust and safety team – responsible for combating misinformation – with its “frontline moderation staff experiencing the least impact”.Musk also stated that he had spoken to civil society leaders at the Anti-Defamation League and the nonprofit Color of Change about “how Twitter will continue to combat hate and harassment and enforce its election integrity policies”.However, members of those groups claimed on Friday that in laying off the teams responsible for retaining election integrity, Musk had “betray[ed]” those promises. They called on advertisers to pull funding from Twitter as risks around elections continue to mount.“Retaining and enforcing election-integrity measures requires an investment in the human expert staff, factcheckers, and moderators, who are being shown the door today,” said Jessica J González, co-CEO of civil liberties group Free Press. In addition to a portion of its trust and safety team, Twitter appears to have axed the entire curation team, responsible for creating guides to authoritative information often surfaced alongside topics with high risk of misinformation. A London-based team member tweeted on Friday that the group at Twitter “is no more”. Another former team member echoed the claims on Friday, stating that the changes “will make Twitter noisier, more dangerous and less interesting”.Twitter also appears to have eliminated its ethics, transparency, and accountability team, which is in charge of opening up the platform’s algorithm for external review and studying the amplification of misinformation and other content.Although Musk has not made any concrete policy changes, nor allowed back any high-profile banned figures such as Donald Trump, the lack of staffing could pose a major problem for enforcing existing policies, Barrett said. Although automated systems are likely to continue to run, “you need human beings to pick up subtle forms of misinformation”.“It does not seem like there will be many people at the desk in the office prepared for oversight of content that could contribute to the continuing erosion of trust in our election system,” Barrett said.Twitter layoffs raise questions about future of infrastructure and moderationRead moreIn addition to misinformation concerns on Twitter, cuts to infrastructure have raised alarm that the platform itself may not survive the influx of traffic expected during the elections. The issue was called into focus earlier this year when a whistleblower accused the company of “egregious” failings in security and safety.An internal source at the company told Reuters that the infrastructure cuts were “delusional”, adding that when user traffic surges, the service can fail “in spectacular ways”.While it is too soon to measure concrete impacts of Twitter’s restructuring, early tracking shows hate speech is increasing. Researchers from Montclair State University found in the 12 hours immediately after Musk took ownership on Twitter, “vulgar and hostile” rhetoric saw an “immediate, visible and measurable spike”, including a rise in racial slurs.“What we have seen so far has been a canary in the coal mine for what might come in the days immediately before and – crucially – in the days after the election,” Barrett said. “This is an all-hands-on-deck situation, and unfortunately many of those hands are out the door.”TopicsTwitterUS midterm elections 2022US politicsSocial mediaElon MusknewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans want working-class voters — without actually supporting workers

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      AnalysisRepublicans want working-class voters — without actually supporting workersSteven GreenhouseGOP courts blue collar voters but most favor anti-union ‘right to work’ laws and reject laws that would protect right to organize After years of struggle, America’s labor unions enjoy greater public approval than at any time in more than 50 years. Yet even as the Republican party seeks to rebrand itself as the party of the working class, its lawmakers, by and large, remain as hostile as ever toward organized labor. It doesn’t look like that situation is about to change.With the midterm elections approaching, and many polls indicating that the Republicans will win control of the House, nearly all Republican lawmakers in Congress oppose proposals that would make it easier to unionize. One hundred and eleven Republican House members and 21 senators are co-sponsoring a bill that would weaken unions by letting workers in all 50 states opt out of paying any fees to the unions that represent them. And at a time when many young workers – among them, Starbucks workers, Apple store workers, museum workers, grad students – are flocking into unions, Republican lawmakers often deride unions as woke, leftwing and obsolete.Congressional Democrats – seeing the surge in unionization drives along with the aggressive anti-union campaigns by Starbucks, Amazon and other companies – say there is increased urgency to enact the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (Pro Act), which would make it easier for workers to unionize. The Pro Act passed the House last year – with 205 Republicans voting against and five in favor – but it faces an uphill battle in the Senate, largely because of a GOP filibuster, and will almost certainly fail to pass if Republicans gain Senate seats in the midterms.The Pro Act remains the Democrats’ overwhelming legislative priority for helping unions – it would, among other things, ban employers’ captive audience meetings and create substantial penalties for corporations that break the law when fighting unionization. Republicans denounce the legislation, vigorously opposing a provision that would override the right-to-work laws enacted in 27 states, laws that allow workers to opt out of paying union dues. The Senate Republicans’ policy committee has slammed the Pro Act, saying it would undermine worker freedom, “heavily tilt the scales in favor of labor” and “curb workers’ choices, threaten jobs and increase costs on employers”.It wasn’t always this way. Two decades ago, there were 30 union-friendly Republicans in the House, but that number has dwindled to a handful, partly because many of the party’s billionaire and corporate donors frown on pro-union Republicans. These donors see unions as bothersome institutions that favor Democrats and reduce corporate profits. Indeed, many Republican lawmakers treat unions and their leaders as enemies.Virginia Foxx, the senior Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, scoffed at the idea that there is a union resurgence and said Democrats “are in the pocket of Big Labor”. “Unions are hitting the panic button and praying that Democrats can gin up a PR campaign to cover up the declining numbers and lack of interest in union membership,” Foxx told the Guardian, noting that union membership has sunk to just 6% of the private-sector workforce. Foxx, who often serves as Congress’s chief spokesperson on labor matters, belittled unions’ recent gains, saying that only a tiny percentage of Starbucks and Apple stores have been unionized.Foxx, a nine-term House member from North Carolina, said: “If Democrats genuinely believe that union popularity is soaring and that union campaigns and strikes are resonating with American workers, then they truly have a tortured relationship with both math and reality.”Even as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reported a 53% jump over the past year in the number of workplace petitions for union elections, Foxx and many other Republicans are backing bills that would make it harder to unionize. With corporations prohibiting union organizers from setting foot on company property to speak with workers, unions rely on NLRB rules requiring employers to give them workers’ home addresses, phone numbers and email addresses so they can communicate with them. But the Employee Privacy Protection Act, a Republican-sponsored bill re-introduced last March, shortly after the recent union surge began, would limit unions to obtaining just one of those three ways to contact workers. Foxx said workers should “never have to hand over their personal contact information” to “a union to which they object”.Bill Samuel, legislative director of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main union federation, said he has seen no sign of Republicans warming up to unions despite their increased popularity – 71% of Americans approve of unions. “I haven’t seen any change” among Republicans, Samuel said. “There’s been no outreach. We haven’t been getting calls from Republicans asking, ‘How can we help workers organize?’”Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the House education and labor committee, agreed, adding: “Republicans are pretty much as hostile as ever toward unions – pretty much down the line.”Scott said Democrats should rush to enact the Pro Act in light of the many daunting obstacles that workers face in seeking to unionize at Starbucks, Amazon and other companies due to intense corporate opposition and a flurry of alleged illegalities by management. In Scott’s view, especially important is a provision that would for the first time allow the NLRB to impose substantial fines against companies that violate the law when battling union drives. “The biggest improvement we need is to have some meaningful sanctions for unfair labor practices,” Scott said. “Right now, there is no meaningful deterrent.”Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, a thinktank for conservative economics, said that many Republicans have grown more interested in worker issues. Cass acknowledged, however, that most Republican lawmakers remain hostile to organized labor because “unions are predominantly financing mechanisms for the Democratic party.”He said some Republicans are open to the idea of increasing worker power, but only if it’s done largely outside the framework of traditional unions. Nevertheless, whether with or without unions, hardly any Republicans are pushing to expand worker power – an idea that would irk corporate Republicans. Many GOP lawmakers instead emphasize worker choice and worker freedom – part of their decades-long effort to enact state right-to-work laws that allow workers to opt out of paying any dues or fees to the unions that represent them.Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina are co-sponsoring the National Right to Work Act, which would let workers in all 50 states opt out of union dues. Wilson told the Guardian that the bill would “eliminate forced-dues clauses” and “allow workers to choose for themselves”. He said Joe Biden and the Democrats were on “a mission to force unionization” on “workers by eliminating employee choice”. Senator Paul said their bill would “put bargaining power where it belongs, in the hands of American workers”. Unions assert, however, that workers have far more bargaining power by bargaining collectively, rather than as individuals.Cass, who worked in Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, supports steps to give workers more power and said it’s a good time for Republicans to push to increase worker power. Their “constituents are significantly and increasingly working class”, Cass noted, adding that Republicans might be more willing to distance themselves from corporations now that more business executives “are on the other side”, having endorsed Democrats.For years, most Republicans lawmakers have opposed any increase in the NLRB’s budget; that agency oversees private-sector union elections and cracks down on employers that break the law in fighting unions. The labor board’s budget hasn’t increased since 2014, a budget freeze that has angered union leaders because they say it hampers the board’s ability to move quickly against law-breaking, anti-union employers.“The NLRB has been flat-funded for a long time,” said Scott, chair of the House labor committee. “With the popularity of unions increasing, the work of the NLRB has increased. In order to get their work done, the board needs significant increases in funding.”But Foxx called increasing NLRB funding “an inherently stupid idea”, asserting that the labor board tilts in favor of unions, just as Democrats asserted that President Trump’s labor board was far too anti-union.The AFL-CIO’s Samuel voiced dismay that many Republicans seem implacably opposed to anything that would help unions expand. “All this,” Samuel said, “illustrates their hostility to make it easier for workers to enjoy what is supposed to be their basic right under the law: to come together to form a union.”TopicsUS unionsUS politicsStarbucksAmazonanalysisReuse this content More

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      ‘We risk another crisis’: TikTok in danger of being major vector of election misinformation

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      ‘We risk another crisis’: TikTok in danger of being major vector of election misinformation A study suggests the video platform is failing to filter false claims and rhetoric in the weeks leading up to US midterms

      Read the new Guardian series exploring the increasing power and reach of TikTok
      In the final sprint to the US midterm elections social media giant TikTok risks being a major vector for election misinformation, experts warn, with the platform’s massive user base and its design making it particularly susceptible to such threats.Preliminary research published last week from digital watchdog Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at New York University suggests the video platform is failing to filter large volumes of election misinformation in the weeks leading up to the vote.TikTok approved 90% of advertisements featuring election misinformation submitted by researchers, including ads containing the wrong election date, false claims about voting requirements, and rhetoric dissuading people from voting.From dance videos to global sensation: what you need to know about TikTok’s riseRead moreTikTok has for several years prohibited political advertising on the platform, including branded content from creators and paid advertisements, and ahead of midterm elections has automatically disabled monetization to better enforce the policy, TikTok global business president Blake Chandlee said in a September blog post. “TikTok is, first and foremost, an entertainment platform,” he wrote.But the NYU study showed TikTok “performed the worst out of all of the platforms tested” in the experiment, the researchers said, approving more of the false advertisements than other sites such as YouTube and Facebook.The findings spark concern among experts who point out that – with 80 million monthly users in the US and large numbers of young Americans indicating the platform is their primary source of news – such posts could have far reaching consequences.Yet the results come to little surprise, those experts say. During previous major elections in the US, TikTok had far fewer users, but misinformation was already spreading widely on the app. TikTok faced challenges moderating misinformation about elections in Kenya and the war in Ukraine.And the company, experts say, is doing far too little to rein in election lies spreading among its users.“This year is going to be much worse as we near the midterms,” said Olivia Little, a researcher who co-authored the Media Matters report. “There has been an exponential increase in users, which only means there will be more misinformation TikTok needs to proactively work to stop or we risk facing another crisis.”A crucial testWith Joe Biden himself warning that the integrity of American elections is under threat, TikTok has announced a slew of policies aimed at combatting election misinformation spreading through the app.The company laid out guidelines and safety measures related to election content and launched an elections center, which “connect[s] people who engage with election content” to approved news sources in more than 45 languages.“To bolster our response to emerging threats, TikTok partners with independent intelligence firms and regularly engages with others across the industry, civil society organizations, and other experts,” said Eric Han, TikTok’s head of US safety, in August.In September, the company also announced new policies requiring government and politician accounts to be verified and said it would ban videos aimed at campaign fundraising. TikTok added it would block verified political accounts from using money-making features available to influencers on the app, such as digital payments and gifting.Still, experts have deep concerns about the spread of election falsehoods on the video app.Those fears are exacerbated by TikTok’s structure, which makes it difficult to investigate and quantify the spread of misinformation. Unlike Twitter, which makes public its Application Programming Interface (API), software that allows researchers to extract data from platforms for analysis, or Meta, which offers its own internal search engine called Crowdtangle, TikTok does not offer tools for external audits. However, independent research as well as the platform’s own transparency reports highlight the challenges it has faced in recent years moderating election-related content.TikTok removed 350,000 videos related to election misinformation in the latter half of 2020, according to a transparency report from the company, and blocked 441,000 videos containing misinformation from user feeds globally. Internet nonprofit Mozilla warned in the run-up to Kenya’s 2022 election that the platform was “failing its first real test” to stem dis- and misinformation during pivotal political moments. The nonprofit said it had found more than 130 videos on the platform containing election-related misinformation, hate speech, and incitement against communities prior to the vote, which together gained more than 4m views. “Rather than learn from the mistakes of more established platforms like Facebook and Twitter, TikTok is following in their footsteps,” Mozilla researcher Odanga Madung wrote at the time.Why TikTok is so vulnerable to misinformationPart of the reason TikTok is uniquely susceptible to misinformation lies in certain features of its design and algorithm, experts say.Its For You Page, or general video feed, is highly customized to users’ individual preferences via an algorithm that’s little understood, even by its own staff. That combination lends itself to misinformation bubbles, said Little, the Media Matters researcher.“TikTok’s hyper-tailored algorithm can blast random accounts into virality very quickly, and I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon because it’s the reason it has become such a popular platform,” she said.Meanwhile, the ease with which users’ remix, record, and repost videos – few of which have been fact-checked – allows misinformation to spread easily while making it more difficult to remove.TikTok’s video-exclusive content brings up additional moderation hurdles, as artificial intelligence processes may find it more difficult to automatically scrape video content for misinformation compared to text. Several recent studies have highlighted how those features have exacerbated the spread of misinformation on the platform. When it comes to TikTok content related to the war in Ukraine, for example, the ability to “remix media” without fact checking it has made it difficult “even for seasoned journalists and researchers to discern truth from rumor, parody and fabrication”, said a recent report from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media.That report cited other design features in the app that make it an easy pathway for misinformation, including that most users post under pseudonyms and that, unlike on Facebook, where users’ feeds are filled primarily with content from friends and people they know, TikTok’s For You Page is largely composed of content from strangers.Some of these problems are not unique to TikTok, said Marc Faddoul co-director of Tracking Exposed, a digital rights organization investigating TikTok’s algorithm.Studies have shown that algorithms across all platforms are optimized to detect and exploit cognitive biases for more polarizing content, and that any platform that relies on algorithms rather than a chronological newsfeed is more susceptible to disinformation. But TikTok is the most accelerated model of an algorithmic feed yet, he said.At the same time, he added, the platform has been slow in coming to grips with issues that have plagued its peers like Facebook and Twitter for years.“Historically, TikTok has characterized itself as an entertainment platform, denying they host political content and therefore disinformation, but we know now that is not the case,” he said.Young user base is particularly at riskExperts say an additional cause for concern is a lack of media literacy among TikTok’s largely young user base. The vast majority of young people in the US use TikTok, a recent Pew Research Center report showed. Internal data from Google revealed in July that nearly 40% of Gen Z – the generation born between the late 1990s and early 2000s – globally uses TikTok and Instagram as their primary search engines.In addition to being more likely to get news coverage from social media, Gen Z also has far higher rates of mistrust in traditional institutions such as the news media and the government compared with past generations, creating a perfect storm for the spread misinformation, said Helen Lee Bouygues, president of the Reboot Foundation, a media literacy advocacy organization.“By the nature of its audience, TikTok is exposing a lot of young children to disinformation who are not trained in media literacy, period,” she said. “They are not equipped with the skills necessary to recognize propaganda or disinformation when they see it online.”The threat is amplified by the sheer amount of time spent on the app, with 67% of US teenagers using the app for an average of 99 minutes per day. Research conducted by the Reboot Foundation showed that the longer a user spends on an app the less likely they are to distinguish between misinformation and fact.To enforce its policies, which prohibit election misinformation, harassment, hateful behavior, and violent extremism, TikTok says it relies on “a combination of people and technology” and partners with fact checkers to moderate content. The company directed questions to this blog post regarding election misinformation measures, but declined to share how many human moderators it employs.Bouygues said the company should do far more to protect its users, particularly young ones. Her research shows that media literacy and in-app nudges towards fact checking could go a long way when it comes to combating misinformation. But government action is needed to force such changes.“If the TikToks of the world really want to fight fake news, they could do it,” she said. “But as long as their financial model is keeping eyes on the page, they have no incentive to do so. That’s where policymaking needs to come into play.”TopicsTikTokThe TikTok takeoverSocial mediaUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More