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    U.S. Court Denies TikTok’s Request to Freeze Sale-or-Ban Law

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    TikTok had sought to temporarily freeze a law that requires its Chinese parent to sell the app or face a U.S. ban next month. The case may now head to the Supreme Court.A federal court on Friday denied TikTok’s request to temporarily freeze a law that requires its Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a ban in the United States as of Jan. 19, a decision that puts the fate of the app in the Supreme Court’s hands.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a filing late on Friday that an injunction was “unwarranted,” and that it had expedited its decision so that TikTok and its users could seek an emergency freeze from the Supreme Court.A week ago, three judges in the same court unanimously denied petitions from the company and its users to overturn the law. TikTok then asked the court on Monday to temporarily block the law until the Supreme Court decided on TikTok’s planned appeal of that decision, and sought a decision by Dec. 16.The court said on Friday that TikTok and its users “have not identified any case in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court.”It isn’t clear whether the Supreme Court will agree to temporarily freeze the law and hear the case, though experts say that is likely.Michael Hughes, a spokesman for TikTok, said, “As we have previously stated, we plan on taking this case to the Supreme Court, which has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech.” He said that American users’ voices would be “silenced” if the law were not stopped.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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      What to Know About Australia’s Social Media Ban for Children Under 16

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      Critics say big questions remain not only about how the new law will be enforced, but also about whether the ban will really protect young people.Australia has passed a law to prevent children under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms.The bill, which the government calls a “world leading” move to protect young people online, was approved in the Senate on Thursday with support from both of the country’s major parties. The lower house of Parliament had passed it earlier in the week.“This is about protecting young people — not punishing or isolating them,” said Michelle Rowland, Australia’s communications minister. She cited exposure to content about drug abuse, eating disorders and violence as some of the harms children can encounter online.The legislation has broad support among Australians, and some parental groups have been vocal advocates. But it has faced backlash from an unlikely alliance of tech giants, human rights groups and social media experts. Critics say there are major unanswered questions about how the law will be enforced, how users’ privacy will be protected and, fundamentally, whether the ban will actually protect children.What’s in the law?The law requires social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to verify the age of users and prohibit those under 16 from opening accounts. 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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      What Trump 2.0 Means for Tech + A.I. Made Me Basic + HatGPT!

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      Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube | iHeartRadioKevin Roose and Rachel Cohn and Dan PowellElisheba IttoopPat McCusker and As of this week, we have a new president-elect. We discuss how the incoming administration’s approach to technology will affect Elon Musk, a TikTok ban, Big Tech’s antitrust challenges and the speed of A.I. progress. Then, Kashmir Hill, a technology reporter for The Times, joins to discuss her weeklong experiment of letting A.I. make every decision in her life. And finally, we play a round of election-free HatGPT!Guest:Kashmir Hill, technology reporter for The New York Times.Additional Reading:What a Trump Victory Means for TechI Took a ‘Decision Holiday’ and Put A.I. in Charge of My LifeAn ‘Interview’ With a Dead Luminary Exposes the Pitfalls of A.I.Meta’s Plan for Nuclear-Powered A.I. Data Center Thwarted by Rare BeesFired Employee Allegedly Hacked Disney World’s Menu System to Alter Peanut Allergy InformationPhoto Illustration by The New York Times; Photos: Doug Mills/The New York Times (Trump); Getty Images (emojis)Credits“Hard Fork” is hosted by More

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      TikTok Faces Lawsuits From 13 States Around Teens and Mental Health

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      More than a dozen states sued TikTok on Tuesday for creating an app designed to be addictive to children and teens.Thirteen states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on Tuesday for creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teens while making false claims to the public about its commitment to safety.In separate lawsuits, a bipartisan group of attorneys general cited internal company documents to paint a picture of a multibillion dollar company that knowingly contributed to a mental health crisis among American teenagers to maximize its advertising revenue. They said that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has relentlessly designed features to prompt heavy, compulsive use of TikTok and that many children were using the app late at night when they would otherwise have been asleep.TikTok “knew the harms to children,” Rob Bonta, the Democratic attorney general of California, said in an interview. “They chose addiction and more use and more eyeballs and more mental and physical harm for our young people in order to get profits — it’s really that simple.”The lawsuits add to a rapidly expanding list of challenges for TikTok in the United States, which now counts 170 million monthly U.S. users. A federal law passed in April calls for the app to be banned in the United States as of January unless it is sold. A federal lawsuit against the company in August also claimed that TikTok allowed children to open accounts, gathered information about them and made it difficult for their parents to delete the accounts.TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The states, many of which started investigating the company’s harms to minors in early 2022, are generally claiming that TikTok’s conduct violates their consumer protection laws. The states say that TikTok plays videos in a manner that aims to make young users lose track of time and sends them round-the-clock notifications and ephemeral content like livestreams to compel them to keep checking in. The longer users stay on the app, the more targeted ads TikTok is able to show them.The attorneys general say that TikTok has misled users about its so-called 60-minute screen time limits for young people and other features that promise to curate the videos that they see.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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      How Meta Distanced Itself From Politics

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      In January 2021, after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on the company’s apps, including Facebook and Instagram.As the United States hurtles toward November’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working.On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And political misinformation is harder to find on the platforms after Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the sites.Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with the heads of election security as he once did, according to four employees. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, these employees said, though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams. He has also decided not to have a “war room,” which Meta previously used to prepare for elections.Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee laying out how he wanted to distance himself and his company from politics. The goal, he said, was to be “neutral” and to not “even appear to be playing a role.”“It’s quite the pendulum swing because a decade ago, everyone at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook. 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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      Obsessed with Sleep

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      The science behind popular methods for improving sleep, and the downsides of caring too much about it.Americans used to say we’d sleep when we were dead. We viewed sleep as a waste of time — something prized by the lazy, and minimized by the industrious.How times have changed. These days, getting in bed early is cool. People, especially those in younger generations, have come to better understand the benefits of a good night’s rest, and many now make sleep a central part of their personal health routines.Experts say this is a good thing: Consistently solid sleep can benefit your heart, brain, immune system and mental health. But our newfound love of sleep is also leading us to strange places. On social media, you can find some people mixing concoctions meant to induce sleep — called “sleepy girl mocktails” — and others trying on sleep aids like mouth tape, nose tape and jaw straps, sometimes all at once. For many, sleep has become something to be optimized, even perfected.Kate Lindsay has a fascinating new story in The Times today that explores this growing fixation — specifically, the large number of people for whom good sleep is not good enough. They are sometimes called “sleepmaxxers.” Kate’s story raises a question I’ve been wondering myself: After so many years of worrying too little about sleep, is it possible some of us have started worrying too much?In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk you through the science behind some popular methods for improving sleep, and the possible downsides of caring too much about it.A “sleepy girl mocktail.”Molly Matalon for The New York TimesWe 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 Expands its Election Resources Ahead of November

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      The company is an increasingly popular source of political news. It’s adding more content about how elections work and media literacy.TikTok is pushing to improve information about the upcoming U.S. presidential election on the app, it said Wednesday.The company will expand a landing page on how elections work and why they can be trusted and run new in-feed videos about media literacy. It will also increase security requirements for verified accounts from politicians and governments in the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald J. Trump and their vice-presidential nominees each have TikTok accounts as of two weeks ago, a sharp pivot from last year, when the vast majority of American politicians were avoiding the app.TikTokTikTokThe efforts come as TikTok warily acknowledges that it has become a much bigger news source for millions of Americans ahead of the presidential election than it was in 2020. It joins other major tech companies like Meta, Google and X that must regularly grapple with how their platforms handle election-related content. But TikTok has an added layer of scrutiny, since it is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and faces a looming possibility that its app could be banned as soon as January, based on national security concerns.“Young people are going to TikTok and other vertical video platforms for news more than ever,” said Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, which worked with TikTok to create a series of videos on media literacy that will soon begin airing to users. “As of late, TikTok has been investing a lot in media literacy and fact-checking.”The U.S. government has expressed some concern that TikTok could imperil future elections. The Justice Department said in July that China could direct ByteDance and TikTok to manipulate videos served to Americans to “undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions.” President Biden signed a landmark law in April that will ban TikTok in the U.S. in January unless ByteDance sells the app to a non-Chinese company.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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      Nepal Lifts Ban on TikTok, in a Likely Overture to China

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      The move signaled that Nepal’s new prime minister, who has cultivated ties with China, would continue on that path.The new prime minister of Nepal, K.P. Sharma Oli, on Thursday overturned a ban on TikTok that his predecessor imposed in November, an apparent sign that the veteran politician intended to strengthen the country’s relations with China, its northern neighbor.The popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was banned for its refusal to curb what the previous Nepalese government had described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” At the time, Nepali officials said that they had resorted to the ban after TikTok declined to address concerns about troubling content.TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.The decision to reinstate TikTok signaled Mr. Oli’s belief that, amid the geopolitical bickering between China and India, Nepal’s neighbor to the south that also banned the app, the Himalayan country was better off aligning with China.TikTok and many other Chinese apps have been banned in India since 2020, amid historically fraught relations between the two countries and more recent efforts to dominate the South Asian region.Prithvi Subba Gurung, a Nepalese government spokesman, said TikTok would now have to abide by certain directives, such as naming a point of contact in the country.“We have set a few conditions such as TikTok to be used for promoting Nepali tourism, supporting us for digital safety, digital literacy and digital education and curb hate content,” Mr. Gurung said.On Thursday morning, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, wrote on the social media platform X, “Today is a good day,” which many Nepalese took to mean that the talks to reinstate TikTok had been finalized.Mr. Oli, 73, who leads Nepal’s largest communist party, returned to power in July as the leader of a new ruling coalition, taking charge of the government for the fourth time. The previous leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, was seen as easier than Mr. Oli for India to manipulate and frequently changing coalition partners for his personal benefit.Mr. Oli has made no secret of his opposition to India’s influence in Nepal. During his first stint as prime minister in 2015, he stood up against a crippling economic blockade that India had imposed over certain provisions in Nepal’s Constitution.During his second stint as prime minister, after elections in 2017, Mr. Oli revised Nepal’s political map in a way that further soured relations with India.On Thursday, Nepal and China also agreed to expand a few development projects aimed at strengthening bilateral ties, including an agreement to complete the upgrade of a highway in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative project. Anupreeta Das More

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      JD Vance’s ‘Never Trump Guy’ Comment Becomes a Viral TikTok Remix

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      A mash-up of years-old comments by the Ohio senator with a hip-hop track is finding a broad audience. It’s part of a new genre of videos on the app.One of the hottest tracks on TikTok this summer is, unexpectedly, a 22-second Petey Pablo hip-hop beat remixed with a years-old audio clip of JD Vance — now former President Donald J. Trump’s vice-presidential pick — declaring, before his loyalties changed, that he was “a never Trump guy.”The song has been used in more than 8,500 TikTok videos since two independent music producers created it in July. Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris have seized on it, wagging their fingers and swinging their arms to it, some hoping to create its official dance. It was also reposted by @KamalaHQ, the campaign’s official TikTok account. Videos with the sound have racked up more than 40 million views overall, according to Zelf, a social video analytics company focused on TikTok.It’s a marquee example of a new genre of political memes finding an audience on the short-form video app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.Politically minded Americans are increasingly embracing TikTok to make videos and trends out of snippets of songs and speeches in this election cycle. The app — a pandemic-fueled curiosity during the last presidential election — has since exploded its user base to 170 million Americans. About half of users under 30 say they use TikTok to help them keep up with politics and political issues, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.“People are still doing dances to random songs, but now people are doing dances to remixes of rap with Kamala Harris speeches over it,” said Emma Mont, a digital creator and administrator of @OrganizerMemes, a liberal meme account.

      @casadimusic Replying to @casadimusic JD Vance is a Never Trump Guy. Kamala Harris for President #nevertrumpguy #kamalaharris #Democrat #kamalahq ♬ Never Trump Guy JD Vance House of Evo Remix – CasaDi 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