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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

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      House Passes Bill to Force TikTok Sale From Chinese Owner or Ban the App

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      The legislation received wide bipartisan support, with both Republicans and Democrats showing an eagerness to appear tough on China.The House on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the hugely popular video app or be banned in the United States. The move escalates a showdown between Beijing and Washington over the control of technologies that could affect national security, free speech and the social media industry.Republican leaders fast-tracked the bill through the House with limited debate, and it passed on a lopsided vote of 352-65, reflecting widespread backing for legislation that would take direct aim at China in an election year. The action came despite TikTok’s efforts to mobilize its 170 million U.S. users against the measure, and amid the Biden administration’s push to persuade lawmakers that Chinese ownership of the platform poses grave national security risks to the United States.The result was a bipartisan coalition behind the measure that included Republicans, who defied former President Donald J. Trump in supporting it, and Democrats, who also fell in line behind a bill that President Biden has said he would sign.The bill faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate, where Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has been noncommittal about bringing it to the floor for a vote and where some lawmakers have vowed to fight it.TikTok has been under threat since 2020, with lawmakers increasingly arguing that Beijing’s relationship with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, raises national security risks. The bill is aimed at getting ByteDance to sell TikTok to non-Chinese owners within six months. The president would sign off on the sale if it resolved national security concerns. If that sale did not happen, the app would be banned.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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      Trump Gives CNBC a Rambling Answer on Why He Backtracked on TikTok Ban

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      Donald Trump told CNBC that banning TikTok would make young people “go crazy” and could benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”Former President Donald J. Trump offered a rambling and confusing explanation on Monday of why he had reversed himself on whether the United States should ban TikTok over concerns that its Chinese ownership poses a threat to national security.In a CNBC interview, Mr. Trump said that he still considered the social media app a national security threat but that banning it would make young people “go crazy.” He added that any action harming TikTok would benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Mr. Trump said. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” he added, “but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”Mr. Trump tried to ban TikTok while in office, pushing its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform to a new owner or face being blocked from American app stores. A House committee advanced legislation last week that would similarly force TikTok to cut ties with ByteDance.In a powerful display of bipartisanship — rare these days in Washington — the top Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party used nearly identical language to describe the risks 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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      Biden the President Wants to Curb TikTok. Biden the Candidate Embraces Its Stars.

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      At a party for social media influencers at the White House this week, President Biden’s political concerns collided with his national security concerns.The White House is so concerned about the security risks of TikTok that federal workers are not allowed to use the app on their government phones. Top Biden administration officials have even helped craft legislation that could ban TikTok in the United States.But those concerns were pushed aside on Thursday, the night of President Biden’s State of the Union address, when dozens of social media influencers — many of them TikTok stars — were invited to the White House for a watch party.The crowd took selfies in the State Dining Room, drank bubbly with the first lady and waved to Mr. Biden from the White House balcony as he left to deliver his speech to Congress.“Don’t jump, I need you!” Mr. Biden shouted to the young influencers filming from above, in a scene that was captured — naturally — in a TikTok video, which was beamed out to hundreds of thousands of people.Thursday’s party at the White House was an example of Mr. Biden’s political concerns colliding head-on with his national security concerns. Despite growing fears that ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, could infringe on the personal data of Americans or manipulate what they see, the president’s campaign is relying on the app to energize a frustrated bloc of young voters ahead of the 2024 election.“From a national security perspective, the campaign joining TikTok was definitely not a good look — it was condoning the use of a platform that the administration and everyone in D.C. recognizes is a national problem,” said Lindsay Gorman, head of technology and geopolitics at the German Marshall Fund and a former tech adviser for the Biden administration.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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      Cat Janice, Singer With Cancer Who Left Her Son a Dance Track, Dies at 31

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      TikTok rallied around the singer, who revealed during her cancer treatment that she had transferred the rights to her final song to her son, as an inheritance of sorts.Cat Janice, a singer and songwriter who released a buoyant pop track from hospice that galvanized her thousands of supporters online to sway, and even groove, in the face of tragedy, died on Wednesday at her family home in Annandale, Va. She was 31.The cause was sarcoma, according to William Ipsan, her brother.The singer and multi-instrumentalist, whose legal name was Catherine Ipsan, started writing music as a teenager and released it throughout her 20s. But “Dance You Outta My Head,” which she shared on social media alongside candid discussion of her grueling cancer treatments, quickly became the biggest hit of her career. Over disco-inflected guitar and exuberant strings, she sang about “dancing on the edge of disaster.”Ms. Ipsan released the song on Jan. 19, a few days after entering hospice care. The song caught fire as her health outlook darkened, with social media users — including celebrities like Jason Derulo — leaving messages of support.It became a common soundtrack on TikTok after Ms. Ipsan encouraged her followers to stream the song as a way of supporting her 7-year-old son, Loren, after her death. “I am leaving this song behind for my son,” she wrote on TikTok. In another post, she said she had “changed all the rights from my songs so every presave and every stream goes to Loren.”The song has been used in more than two million TikTok videos and became the singer’s first song to enter the Billboard charts.“I’m praying my story isn’t over yet,” she wrote in a post on her birthday, the day after the song’s release. “But if it is, this is a pretty incredible way to say goodbye.”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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      Supreme Court to Decide How the First Amendment Applies to Social Media

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      Challenges to laws in Florida and Texas meant to protect conservative viewpoints are likely to yield a major constitutional ruling on tech platforms’ free speech rights.The most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, to be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, may turn on a single question: Do platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and X most closely resemble newspapers or shopping centers or phone companies?The two cases arrive at the court garbed in politics, as they concern laws in Florida and Texas aimed at protecting conservative speech by forbidding leading social media sites from removing posts based on the views they express.But the outsize question the cases present transcends ideology. It is whether tech platforms have free speech rights to make editorial judgments. Picking the apt analogy from the court’s precedents could decide the matter, but none of the available ones is a perfect fit.If the platforms are like newspapers, they may publish what they want without government interference. If they are like private shopping centers open to the public, they may be required to let visitors say what they like. And if they are like phone companies, they must transmit everyone’s speech.“It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a 2022 dissent when one of the cases briefly reached the Supreme Court.Supporters of the state laws say they foster free speech, giving the public access to all points of view. Opponents say the laws trample on the platforms’ own First Amendment rights and would turn them into cesspools of filth, hate and lies. One contrarian brief, from liberal professors, urged the justices to uphold the key provision of the Texas law despite the harm they said it would cause.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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      A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men

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      This box represents a real photo of a 9-year-old girl in a golden bikini lounging on a towel. The photo was posted on her Instagram account, which is run by adults. 1 🔥🔥🔥 wooowww Mama mia ❤️❤️🥰💯🤗 Great body😍🔥❤️ Love 😍😍😍😍 Perfect bikini body ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️😋😋😋😍😍😍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Mmmmmmmmm take that bikini off 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ You’re sooooo hot ❤️🤗💋🌺🌹🌹💯 […] More

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      TikTok Is Subject of E.U. Inquiry Over ‘Addictive Design’

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      The European Commission said it would investigate whether the site violated online laws aimed at protecting children from harmful content.European Union regulators on Monday opened an investigation into TikTok over potential breaches of online content rules aimed at protecting children, saying the popular social media platform’s “addictive design” risked exposing young people to harmful content.The move widens a preliminary investigation conducted in recent months into whether TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, violated a new European law, the Digital Services Act, which requires large social media companies to stop the spread of harmful material. Under the law, companies can be penalized up to 6 percent of their global revenues.TikTok has been under the scrutiny of E.U. regulators for months. The company was fined roughly $370 million in September for having weak safeguards to protect the personal information of children using the platform. Policymakers in the United States have also been wrestling with how to regulate the platform for harmful content and data privacy — concerns amplified by TikTok’s links to China.The European Commission said it was particularly focused on how the company was managing the risk of “negative effects stemming” from the site’s design, including algorithmic systems that it said “may stimulate behavioral addictions” or “create so-called ‘rabbit hole effects,’” where a user is pulled further and further into the site’s content.Those risks could potentially compromise a person’s “physical and mental well-being,” the commission said.“The safety and well-being of online users in Europe is crucial,” Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s executive vice president overseeing digital policy, said in a statement. “TikTok needs to take a close look at the services they offer and carefully consider the risks that they pose to their users — young as well as old.”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