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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

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      Nikki Haley Again Calls for a TikTok Ban Over Privacy Concerns

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      The Republican Party might have challenges with outreach to Generation Z, but Nikki Haley, appearing in a Fox News town hall event on Sunday, said the answer was not TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform.In a conversation with the “America Reports” co-anchor John Roberts, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, criticized President Biden for posting a TikTok clip on the night of the Super Bowl, in an appeal to younger voters. She also hit former President Donald J. Trump, her G.O.P. primary rival, for failing to curtail its use while he was in the White House.“President Trump said he would ban TikTok, and when President Xi asked him not to, that fell to the wayside,” she said, referring to Xi Jinping, China’s leader. “We should have banned it from the beginning. It is incredibly dangerous.”The volleys against both men are part of a broader argument Ms. Haley has been making in recent media appearances and on the campaign trail that it is time for fresh leadership. Her attacks on Mr. Trump, whom she served under as ambassador, have become sharper in particular, as the two head into a primary showdown in South Carolina on Saturday.In the town hall event on Sunday, as she has before, Ms. Haley broke with the isolationist wing of her party on foreign policy and pummeled the former president for his friendly relationship with authoritarian leaders like Mr. Jinping and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. She argued that Mr. Putin “knows exactly what he did” with Aleksei A. Navalny, the outspoken Russian opposition leader who died last week in prison, and chastised Mr. Trump for suggesting he would encourage Russian aggression against U.S. allies in Europe.“I think that’s why it’s so damaging when Trump said that he would choose Putin and actually encouraged to invade NATO allies, instead of standing with our allies,” she said.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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      Tech CEOs Got Grilled, but New Rules Are Still a Question

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      Tech leaders faced a grilling in the Senate, and one offered an apology. But skeptics fear little will change this time.Five tech C.E.O.s faced a grilling yesterday, but it’s unclear whether new laws to impose more safeguards for online children’s safety will pass.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesA lot of heat, but will there be regulation?Five technology C.E.O.s endured hours of grilling by senators on both sides of the aisle about their apparent failures to make their platforms safer for children, with some lawmakers accusing them of having “blood” on their hands.But for all of the drama, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta apologizing to relatives of online child sex abuse victims, few observers believe that there’s much chance of concrete action.“Your product is killing people,” Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, flatly told Zuckerberg at Wednesday’s hearing. Over 3.5 hours, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee laid into the Meta chief and the heads of Discord, Snap, TikTok and X over their policies. (Before the hearing began, senators released internal Meta documents that showed that executives had rejected efforts to devote more resources to safeguard children.)But tech C.E.O.s offered only qualified support for legislative efforts. Those include the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, which would require tech platforms to take “reasonable measures” to prevent harm, and STOP CSAM and EARN IT, two bills that would curtail some of the liability shield given to those companies by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.Both Evan Spiegel of Snap and Linda Yaccarino of X backed KOSA, and Yaccarino also became the first tech C.E.O. to back the STOP CSAM Act. But neither endorsed EARN IT.Zuckerberg called for legislation to force Apple and Google — neither of which was asked to testify — to be held responsible for verifying app users’ ages. But he otherwise emphasized that Meta had already offered resources to keep children safe.Shou Chew of TikTok noted only that his company expected to invest over $2 billion in trust and safety measures this year.Jason Citron of Discord allowed that Section 230 “needs to be updated,” and his company later said that it supports “elements” of STOP CSAM.Experts worry that we’ve seen this play out before. Tech companies have zealously sought to defend Section 230, which protects them from liability for content users post on their platforms. Some lawmakers say altering it would be crucial to holding online platforms to account.Meanwhile, tech groups have fought efforts by states to tighten the use of their services by children. Such laws would lead to a patchwork of regulations that should instead be addressed by Congress, the industry has argued.Congress has failed to move meaningfully on such legislation. Absent a sea change in congressional will, Wednesday’s drama may have been just that.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?  More

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      Universal Music Group Threatens to Remove Music From TikTok

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      The company has been renegotiating its contract to license music with the social media site, which expires Wednesday.Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, said it would revoke the licenses for its vast catalog of songs from TikTok on Wednesday if the companies could not reach a new deal targeting artist compensation, artificial intelligence and other issues.In an open letter posted late Tuesday, Universal accused TikTok of responding to the company with “indifference, and then with intimidation,” creating a public squabble between the companies in the remaining hours of their existing contract. If the talks fail, TikTok users will be left without some of their favorite songs, including those by Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Alicia Keys and others.TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is indisputably one of the fastest growing and most popular social media platforms, with more than a billion users. The company says that includes about 150 million Americans. For a majority of TikTok users, music is an integral part of the experience, as it plays over the short clips that fill users’ feeds.TikTok’s current license for using music from Universal’s catalog expires on Wednesday, and in negotiating its renewal, Universal said it asked TikTok to address three specific issues, including artist compensation. Universal said TikTok had proposed paying Universal’s artists and songwriters a fraction of the rate that similar social media platforms pay. Universal accused TikTok of trying to build a music-based business “without paying fair value for the music.”Universal said that as negations continued, TikTok tried to “bully” the company into accepting a deal worth less than their previous deal, claiming it was far less than fair market value.As of Wednesday morning, it was unclear if talks between Universal and TikTok were ongoing or if they had broken down. Universal did not immediately respond to a request for further comment, and a spokeswoman for TikTok said the company had nothing to add beyond a statement shared on social media, in which it accused Universal of putting “their own greed above the interests” of their artists and songwriters.“Despite Universal’s false narrative and rhetoric, the fact is they have chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent,” TikTok said in its statement. More

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      What Is the ‘Mob Wife Aesthetic’? TikTok’s Newest Trend Inspired by ‘The Sopranos.’

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      A TikTok trend that’s about more than French manicures and furs, the look focuses on conspicuous signifiers of wealth earned outside the rule of law.It’s not every day that Francis Ford Coppola deigns to weigh in on a TikTok trend.But he made an exception for the so-called mob wife aesthetic — a louche amalgamation of fur coats, leather and leopard prints that are being presented on the platform as a kind of mafiosa cosplay.In a recent Instagram post, Mr. Coppola, the director of “The Godfather,” compared the style to that of Connie Corleone, a character from the film portrayed by his sister, Talia Shire: “a sultry, delightful Italian princess.”Hundreds of videos on the app show young women with no apparent marital relationship to organized crime trying on their own approximations of the look, which usually involve heavy jewelry and heavier eyeliner.TikTok churns out a new reigning “aesthetic” every few months, and they vary widely in their real-world influence on offscreen dress. So what is actually powering this newly popular glamorization of outlaw-adjacent women?

      @thesweetpaisana How to dress like a mob wife (in the style of how to dress like you’re from the lower east side) yes this is satire (kind of) use this sound to show me your mob wife style! #mobwife #mobwives #italiangirl #italianamerican #italianamericansbelike #fashiontiktok #mobwifewinter #fyp ♬ Mob Wife Energy Activate – The Sweet Paisana What is the ‘mob wife aesthetic’?The most basic version involves throwing a fur coat — real or faux — over an all-black outfit. But according to its proponents, the look is nothing without the attitude to go with it. Careful students of the mob wife oeuvre add red nails and lipstick, a high-volume hairdo and sunglasses big enough to function as a kind of windshield.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?  More

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      Trump Cacophony Hits Different This Time

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      When was the last time you listened to Donald Trump speak at length? There’s a qualitative way to think about this question, about the substance of what he’s saying: He is still talking — perhaps more than people realize — about how the last election was stolen from him, and he treats the 2020 election as a Year Zero event that has ruined the world.But there’s a second — quantitative — way of looking at this question.In 2015 and 2016, as he was becoming the Republican nominee the first time, Mr. Trump quickly transformed into an all-encompassing, central figure, in an evolving, building story that started like a dark joke that Mr. Trump was in on, then swooned into a reality. Around this time eight years ago, terrorist mass shootings took place in Paris and California as the race for the Republican nomination became increasingly dark. It seemed to click into place then that Mr. Trump’s fluid plans, reactionary ideas, jokes and lies could coexist with and shape grave events. The combined effect of all this was to concentrate the country’s attention like a supernova; reaction to Mr. Trump became a constant feature of politics and also people’s personal lives.But the path toward his likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same. “The street still hopes for somebody else,” one Trump-critical donor recently said of Wall Street donors, a kind of dreamy summary of where things stand. Sarah Longwell, who’s overseen regular focus groups, noted on her podcast this fall that many voters seem not to have clocked that Mr. Trump and President Biden are likely to be the nominees. “People are constantly telling me, ‘But couldn’t this happen? But couldn’t this happen?’” If Mr. Trump were to win the first two contests by large enough margins, the general election could essentially begin as early as next month.Why does the volume around Mr. Trump feel different? For one thing, he has opted out of two old ways he achieved omnipresence, no longer tweeting and no longer appearing at Republican debates. Eight years in, there is also a lack of suspense about whether Mr. Trump could become the Republican nominee or the president.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?  More