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  • For TikTok users, mourning, frustration and clinging to hope as TikTok ban looms

    For TikTok users, mourning, frustration and clinging to hope as TikTok ban looms

    NEW YORK — The U.S. is inching closer and closer to a potential TikTok ban — with the nation’s highest court upholding a law that’s set to halt new downloads of the app starting Sunday. But many questions around what exactly this ban will look like, and whether it will actually be enforced, remain.

    That puts millions of users and content creators in limbo — particularly influencers and small business owners who have come to rely on the mega-popular social media platform as a source of income.

    Among those individuals is Terrell Wade, a comedian, actor and content creator with 1.5 million followers on TikTok under the handle @TheWadeEmpire. Wade, who has turned his TikTok presence into a full-time job, said he expects “two days of chaos” as the Sunday deadline nears.

    “At this point, I really don’t know what to believe,” Wade told The Associated Press.

    In a unanimous decision on Friday, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that will ban TikTok unless it’s sold by its China-based parent company before Jan. 19 — ruling that a risk to national security posed by the platform’s ties to China overcomes First Amendment concerns about limiting free speech on and by the app.

    A sale does not appear imminent, meaning the ban should go into effect Sunday. But the ruling also arrives just days before the inauguration of a new president.

    President Joe Biden’s administration has maintained that TikTok must change its ownership to address national security concerns, but signaled that it won’t enforce the law on Sunday, the Democrat’s final full day in office. On Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that actions to enforce the law will fall to the new administration due to “the sheer fact of timing.” Meanwhile, Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who once also tried to ban TikTok, has now vowed to preserve access to the platform. But what his options will be following Monday’s inauguration remains unclear.

    Among other points of confusion is what a ban on TikTok will look like. Experts have said the app will not disappear from existing users’ devices once the law takes effect. But new users won’t be able to download it and updates will not be available. That will eventually render the app unworkable, the Justice Department said in court filings.

    All of this is “a reminder to the creator community that social media platforms can come and go,” notes Kelsey Chickering, a principal analyst at Forrester, stressing the disruptions TikTok creators and influencers will feel if the ban takes effect. If access is lost, she adds, many will have to pivot and re-build their presence on other platforms.

    While bracing for a potential Sunday ban, Wade is among creators who hope that something happens to avert the shutdown, although he thinks he has enough followers on other platforms to stay afloat.

    “I’m still remaining optimistic,” he said.

    Still, many continue to express fears over the potential of losing TikTok.

    Janette Ok, a full-time content creator based in Los Angeles, says TikTok is the primary platform she uses today. As an influencer and also an artist, she says the platform has helped her make brand deals and promote her music — bringing “opportunities that I never believed I could experience in my lifetime.”

    Ok was also among influencers who TikTok brought to Washington in 2023 to lobby for the preservation of the app, and remembers a ban being discussed as far back as 2020. And as someone who is Asian, the efforts to ban TikTok over the years have also felt “a little xenophobic,” she added.

    “I hear all these different things, and I don’t know what to believe — so that’s where I’m very frustrated. I’m confused. I’m disappointed,” Ok said. “It’s a beautiful app, it’s brought so many people together, it’s changed a lot of people’s lives, and for it to just be taken away like that feels … so not American.”

    Jordan Smith, a former WNBA player who operates The Elevated Closet in Austin, Texas — a clothing brand for tall women — depends on TikTok and TikTok Shop to find customers that fit her niche demographic that’s difficult to specifically market to otherwise.

    “On TikTok I’ve just been able to find that audience so much easier,” she said.

    She fears losing TikTok will hurt her business, and she’ll miss it personally, too. So she’s following what people are saying will happen on Sunday and hopes a ban might be diverted.

    “It kind of seems like Biden’s kind of pushing it off to Trump,” she said. “So people have hopes that maybe we have a few more days and it won’t go dark on Sunday, but I don’t really know.”

    Alejandro Flores-Munoz owns a catering business in the Denver area called Combi Taco, or @combicafe on TikTok. TikTok helped him reach customers without spending money on marketing, he said. He was optimistic that TikTok would stick around until he heard Friday’s Supreme Court decision.

    “Up until today, I was extremely optimistic. And after today’s Supreme Court decision to uphold the ban or the sale of TikTok, I weigh my options,” he said. “But honestly, it’s very disheartening, specifically because I truly did rely on the app for my business and my growth of my business.”

    Going viral on TikTok helped Ruben Trujillo market his Cafe Emporos Coffeegrams, a card that includes coffee, tea or hot chocolate. He said he’s growing frustrated with the ever-evolving politics surrounding the ban.

    “It’s kind of like they keep putting the ball in each other’s court, but who’s going to make the decision?” he said. He said small business owners are told to “be creative, pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” he said. “And a lot of people did that, and it’s like those bootstraps are being cut now.”

    _____

    Associated Press reporters Haleluya Hadero in South Bend, Indiana, and Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • Australia won’t force social media users to share their personal details when child ban takes effect

    Australia won’t force social media users to share their personal details when child ban takes effect

    MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia’s communications minister said Wednesday the government won’t force social media users to hand over their personal information to tech companies, as children younger than 16 are set to be banned from the platforms.

    Michelle Rowland plans to introduce into Parliament on Thursday world-first legislation that would make X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram responsible for excluding Australian children younger than 16 from the platforms.

    After the bill becomes law, the platforms would have one year to work out how to implement the ban on younger children before they face fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($33 million) for systemic breaches.

    How the platforms will be able to determine the ages of account holders is not yet known.

    Rowland told Parliament on Wednesday the legislation will contain “robust provisions” to protect social media users’ privacy.

    “This is not about government mandating any form of technology or demanding any personal information be handed over to social media companies,” Rowland said.

    The government announced last week that a consortium led by British company Age Check Certification Scheme has been contracted to examine various technologies to estimate and verify ages.

    In addition to removing children under 16 from social media, Australia is also looking for ways to prevent children under 18 from accessing online pornography, a government statement said.

    Age Check Certification Scheme’s chief executive Tony Allen said Monday the technologies being considered included age estimation and age inference. Inference involves establishing a series of facts about individuals that point to them being at least a certain age.

    “None of these methods is 100% accurate,” Allen told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

    Allen’s company will report back to the Australian government by the end of June next year.

    “I think if people understand the risk and the check is carried out close to that risk, then I think people generally are OK … We don’t want our children to be exposed to extreme violent video games or to pornography or to suicide material or to things that are going to cause them problems with their mental development such as body dysmorphia and weight loss and stuff like that,” Allen said.

    “What people are less keen on is having to go through ID check and verifications to access the internet generally or to do things online generally,” Allen added.

    Digital Industry Group Inc., an advocate for the digital industry in Australia, described the age limit as a “20th century response to 21st century challenges.”

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  • What is Bluesky, the fast-growing social platform welcoming fleeing X users?

    SAN FRANCISCO — Disgruntled X users are again flocking to Bluesky, a newer social media platform that grew out of the former Twitter before billionaire Elon Musk took it over in 2022. While it remains small compared to established online spaces such as X, it has emerged as an alternative for those looking for a different mood, lighter and friendlier and less influenced by Musk.

    Championed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. That invite-only period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles Musk’s X, with a “discover” feed and a chronological feed for accounts that users follow. Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as find “starter packs” that provide a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow.

    Bluesky said in mid-November that its total users surged to 15 million, up from roughly 13 million at the end of October, as some X users look for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and talk to others online. The post-election uptick in users isn’t the first time Bluesky has benefited from people leaving X. The platform gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August — 85% of them from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 new users signed up in one day in October, when X signaled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user’s public posts.

    Across the platform, new users — among them journalists, left-leaning politicians and celebrities — have posted memes and shared that they were looking forward to using a space free from advertisements and hate speech. Some said it reminded them of the early days of Twitter more than a decade ago.

    Despite Bluesky’s growth, X posted after the election that it had “dominated the global conversation on the U.S. election” and had set new records.

    Bluesky, though, has bigger ambitions than to supplant X. Beyond the platform itself, it is building a technical foundation — what it calls “a protocol for public conversation” — that could make social networks work across different platforms — also known as interoperability — like email, blogs or phone numbers.

    Currently, you can’t cross between social platforms to leave a comment on someone’s account. Twitter users must stay on Twitter and TikTok users must stay on TikTok if they want to interact with accounts on those services. Big Tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-focused business models.

    Bluesky is trying to reimagine all of this and working toward interoperability.

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  • Australia will require social media platforms to act to prevent online harm to users

    Australia will require social media platforms to act to prevent online harm to users

    MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia plans to require social media platforms to act to prevent online harms to users such as bullying, predatory behavior and algorithms pushing destructive content, the government said Thursday.

    “The Digital Duty of Care will place the onus on digital platforms to proactively keep Australians safe and better prevent online harms,” Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement.

    The proposed changes to the Online Safety Act were announced before the government next week introduces to Parliament world-first legislation that would ban children younger than 16 from platforms including X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

    Critics have argued that removing children from social media reduced incentives for platforms to provide safer online environments.

    Social media has been blamed for an increase in children taking their own lives and developing eating disorders due to bulling and exposures to negative body images.

    Rowland said making tech companies legally responsible for keeping Australians safe was an approach already adopted by Britain and the European Union.

    Digital businesses would be required to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harms on their platforms and services. The duty of care framework would be underpinned by risk assessment and risk mitigation, and informed by safety-by-design principles, the minister said.

    Legislating a duty of care would mean services can’t “set and forget.” Instead, their obligations would mean they need to continually identify and mitigate potential risks, as technology and service offerings change and evolve, she said.

    The categories of harm in the legislation include harm to young people and mental well-being, promotion of harmful practices and illegal activity.

    The government has not said when the duty of care legislation will be introduced to Parliament or outlined the punishment for breaches.

    The Digital Industry Group Inc., an advocate for the digital industry in Australia better known as DIGI, welcomed government efforts to “future-proof” the Online Safety Act.

    “DIGI’s members together represent some of the safest sections of the Internet, and their work to keep people safe on their services never stops,” DIGI managing director Sunita Bose said in a statement.

    “While we wait for further details about this announcement, DIGI’s members will continue to deliver safety-by-design on their services and work constructively with the government to keep Australians safe online,” Bose added.

    Swinburne University digital media expert Belinda Barnet described the duty of care as a “great idea.”

    “It’s quite pioneering to expect that platforms that host Australian users would have a duty of care responsibility in terms of the content they show and the experiences they offer,” Barnet said.

    “It’s making the platforms take responsibility and that just simply doesn’t happen at the moment. There’s an assumption that they’re a neutral third party. They’re not responsible for the impact of that content,” Barnet added.

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  • Bluesky has added 1 million users since the US election as people seek alternatives to X

    Bluesky has added 1 million users since the US election as people seek alternatives to X

    LOS ANGELES — Social media site Bluesky has gained 1 million new users in the week since the U.S. election, as some X users look for an alternative platform to post their thoughts and engage with others online.

    Bluesky said Wednesday that its total users surged to 15 million, up from roughly 13 million at the end of October.

    Championed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was an invitation-only space until it opened to the public in February. That invite-only period gave the site time to build out moderation tools and other features. The platform resembles Elon Musk’s X, with a “discover” feed as well a chronological feed for accounts that users follow. Users can send direct messages and pin posts, as well as find “starter packs” that provide a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow.

    The post-election uptick in users isn’t the first time that Bluesky has benefitted from people leaving X. Bluesky gained 2.6 million users in the week after X was banned in Brazil in August — 85% of them from Brazil, the company said. About 500,000 new users signed up in the span of one day last month, when X signaled that blocked accounts would be able to see a user’s public posts.

    Despite Bluesky’s growth, X posted last week that it had “dominated the global conversation on the U.S. election” and had set new records. The platform saw a 15.5% jump in new-user signups on Election Day, X said, with a record 942 million posts worldwide. Representatives for Bluesky and for X did not respond to requests for comment.

    Bluesky has referenced its competitive relationship to X through tongue-in-cheeks comments, including an Election Day post on X referencing Musk watching voting results come in with President-elect Donald Trump.

    “I can guarantee that no Bluesky team members will be sitting with a presidential candidate tonight and giving them direct access to control what you see online,” Bluesky said.

    Across the platform, new users — among of them journalists, left-leaning politicians and celebrities — have posted memes and shared that they were looking forward to using a space free from advertisements and hate speech. Some said it reminded them of the early days of X, when it was still Twitter.

    On Wednesday, The Guardian said it would no longer post on X, citing “far right conspiracy theories and racism” on the site as a reason.

    Last year, advertisers such as IBM, NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast fled X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

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  • South Korea fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting information on Facebook users

    South Korea fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting information on Facebook users

    SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s privacy watchdog on Tuesday fined social media company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with thousands of advertisers.

    It was the latest in a series of penalties against Meta by South Korean authorities in recent years as they increase their scrutiny of how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, handles private information.

    Following a four-year investigation, South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022.

    It said the company shared the data with around 4,000 advertisers.

    South Korea’s privacy law provides strict protection for information related to personal beliefs, political views and sexual behavior, and bars companies from processing or using such data without the specific consent of the person involved.

    The commission said Meta amassed sensitive information by analyzing the pages the Facebook users liked or the advertisements they clicked on.

    The company categorized ads to identify users interested in themes such as specific religions, same-sex and transgender issues, and issues related to North Korean escapees, said Lee Eun Jung, a director at the commission who led the investigation on Meta.

    “While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent,” Lee said.

    Lee also said Meta put the privacy of Facebook users at risk by failing to implement basic security measures such as removing or blocking inactive pages. As a result, hackers were able to use inactive pages to forge identities and request password resets for the accounts of other Facebook users. Meta approved these requests without proper verification, which resulted in data breaches affecting at least 10 South Korean Facebook users, Lee said.

    In September, European regulators hit Meta with over $100 million in fines for a 2019 security lapse in which user passwords were temporarily exposed in an un-encrypted form.

    Meta’s South Korean office said it would “carefully review” the commission’s decision, but didn’t immediately provide more comment.

    In 2022, the commission fined Google and Meta a combined 100 billion won ($72 million) for tracking consumers’ online behavior without their consent and using their data for targeted advertisements, in the biggest penalties ever imposed in South Korea for privacy law violations.

    The commission said then that the two companies didn’t clearly inform users or obtain their consent to collect data about them as they used other websites or services outside their own platforms. It ordered the companies to provide an “easy and clear” consent process to give people more control over whether to share information about what they do online.

    The commission also hit Meta with a 6.7 billion won ($4.8 million) fine in 2020 for providing personal information about itsx users to third parties without consent.

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  • Google Maps adds AI features to help users explore and navigate the world around them

    Google Maps adds AI features to help users explore and navigate the world around them

    PALO ALTO, Calif. — Google Maps is heading down a new road steered by artificial intelligence.

    The shift announced Thursday will bring more of the revolutionary AI technology that Google already has been baking into its dominant search engine to the digital maps service that the internet company launched nearly 20 years ago as part of its efforts to expand into new frontiers.

    Google Maps recently surpassed 2 billion monthly users worldwide for the first time, a milestone that illustrates how dependent people have become on the service’s directions during their daily commutes and excursions to new places. With the introduction of Google’s AI-powered Gemini technology, the maps are now being set up to become entertainment guides in addition to navigational tools.

    Starting this week in the U.S. only, users will be able to converse with Google Maps to ask for tips on things to do around specific spots in a neighborhood or city and receive lists of restaurants, bars and other nearby attractions that include reviews that have been compiled through the years. The new features will also provide more detailed information about parking options near a designated destination along with walking directions for a user to check after departing the car.

    “We are entering a new era of maps,” Miriam Daniel, general manager of Google Maps, told reporters Wednesday during a preview of the features presented in Palo Alto, California. “We are transforming how you navigate and explore the world.”

    Google Maps also is trying to address complaints by introducing more detailed imagery that will make it easier to see which lane of the road to be situated in well ahead of having to make a turn.

    In another AI twist, Google Maps is going to allow outside developers to tap into the language models underlying its Gemini technology to enable pose questions about specific destinations, such as apartments or restaurants, and get their queries answered within seconds. Google says this new feature, which initially will go through a testing phase, has undergone a fact-checking procedure that it calls “grounding.”

    Google’s Waze maps, which focus exclusively on real-time driving directions, will use AI to offer a conversational way for its roughly 180 million monthly users to announce hazards in the road and other problems that could affect traveling times.

    The decision to bring AI into a service that so many rely upon to get from one point to the next reflects Google’s growing confidence in its ability to prevent its Gemini technology from providing false or misleading information, also known as “hallucinations,” to users. Google’s AI has already been caught hallucinating in some of the summaries that began rolling in May, including advice to put glue on pizza and an assertion that the fourth U.S. president, James Madison, graduated from the University of Wisconsin, located in a city named after him.

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  • Facebook, YouTube and TikTok users in Europe get forum to challenge social media content decisions

    Facebook, YouTube and TikTok users in Europe get forum to challenge social media content decisions

    LONDON — Social media users in the European Union will soon have a new forum to challenge decisions by platforms to remove posts and videos for breaking their rules or leave up others that may violate them.

    An “out of court dispute settlement body” named the Appeals Center Europe said Tuesday it has been certified by Irish regulators to act as a referee on content moderation disputes across the 27-nation EU, starting with cases involving Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.

    The center is similar to Meta’s Oversight Board, a quasi-independent body set up in 2020 that acts like a supreme court for thorny decisions about content moderation issues on Facebook, Instagram and Threads submitted by users around the world.

    Under the EU’s digital rulebook known as the Digital Services Act, or DSA, tech companies and social media platforms are required to work with dispute settlement bodies and comply with any decisions they make. EU officials in Brussels wanted to give EU citizens a way to challenge any decisions made by Big Tech companies as they sought to balance the right to free speech against the goal of curbing online risks.

    The center will hear appeals from users or groups located in the EU about “everything from violence and incitement to hate speech to bullying and harassment,” CEO Thomas Hughes said.

    “It could be everything from a case that relates to a head of state all the way through to a neighborly dispute,” Hughes said.

    The Digital Services Act is a sweeping set of regulations that requires tech and social media companies operating in Europe to clean up their platforms under threat of hefty fines.

    The Appeals Center, based in Dublin, where many Silicon Valley tech companies have their European headquarters, will start hearing complaints from users before the end of the year. It’s initially dealing with Facebook, YouTube and TikTok users because it wanted to start with the biggest platforms, with plans to add others later. Unlike the Oversight Board, which can cherry pick the biggest and most important cases, the center will have to rule on every case it gets.

    The Oversight Board both issues binding decisions on individual cases, such as ruling in September on three separate posts with the controversial Palestinian rallying cry “ from the river to the sea,” and also weighs in on wider policy issues with non-binding recommendations, such as guidance in July on updating Meta’s policies on non-consensual deepfakes after reviewing a case involving deepfake intimate images of two women.

    The Appeals Center’s decisions, in contrast, will be limited to whether content such as a post, photo or video violates each platform’s rules.

    Hughes said the center will hire staff from across the EU to handle what he said could be up to tens of thousands of cases each year. The staff will have expertise in specific regions, languages and policy areas.

    Meta’s Oversight Board is providing 15 million euros ($16.5 million) in startup funding, said Hughes, who was previously the Oversight Board’s director. He added that the two bodies will operate separately but will “point in the same direction in terms of platform accountability and transparency, user rights” and applying a human rights framework to online speech.

    The Appeals Center will fund its ongoing operations by charging tech companies 95 euros for every case it hears, as well as a 5 euro fee from users who raise disputes. This “nominal” fee is intended to stop people from “gaming or abusing” the system and will be refunded if a user wins, Hughes said.

    The decisions are not binding, but users will still get their money back if the center rules in favor of their disputes, regardless of the action the platform does or does not take.

    There’s a 90-day deadline for decisions, but in most cases they will be made much more quickly, he said.

    ___

    Associated Press writer Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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  • Australia’s online dating industry adopts code of conduct to keep users safer

    Australia’s online dating industry adopts code of conduct to keep users safer

    MELBOURNE, Australia — A code of conduct will be enforced on the online dating industry to better protect Australian users after research found that three-in-four people suffer some form of sexual violence through the platforms, Australia’s government said on Tuesday.

    Bumble, Grindr and Match Group Inc., a Texas-based company that owns platforms including Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid and Plenty of Fish, have agreed to the code that took effect on Tuesday, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said.

    The platforms, which account for 75% of the industry in Australia, have until April 1 to implement the changes before they are strictly enforced, Rowland said.

    The code requires the platforms’ systems to detect potential incidents of online-enabled harm and demands that the accounts of some offenders are terminated.

    Complaint and reporting mechanisms are to be made prominent and transparent. A new rating system will show users how well platforms are meeting their obligations under the code.

    The government called for a code of conduct last year after the Australian Institute of Criminology research found that three-in-four users of dating apps or websites had experienced some form of sexual violence through these platforms in the five years through 2021.

    “There needs to be a complaint-handling process. This is a pretty basic feature that Australians would have expected in the first place,” Rowland told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Tuesday.

    “If there are grounds to ban a particular individual from utilizing one of those platforms, if they’re banned on one platform, they’re blocked on all platforms,” she added.

    Bumble said it shared the government’s hope of eliminating gender-based violence and was grateful for the opportunity to work with the government and industry on what the platform described as a “world-first dating code of practice.”

    “We know that domestic and sexual violence is an enormous problem in Australia, and that women, members of LGBTQ+ communities, and First Nations are the most at risk,” a Bumble statement said.

    “Bumble puts women’s experiences at the center of our mission to create a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable, and safety has been central to our mission from day one,” Bumble added.

    The other platforms that signed up to the code did not immediately respond to request for comment on Tuesday. All helped design the code.

    Platforms that have not signed up include Happn, Coffee Meets Bagel and Feeld.

    The government expects the code will enable Australians to make better informed choices about which dating apps are best equipped to provide a safe dating experience.

    The government has also warned the online dating industry that it will legislate if the operators fail to keep Australians safe on their platforms.

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