The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday proposed sweeping changes to a 2020 privacy order with Facebook—now called Meta. The FTC said the company has failed to fully comply with the order. Meta called the announcement a “political stunt.”
The move by TikTok comes as several states, including Indiana, restrict access to the video-sharing platform on government-issued devices due to national security concerns.
On the one side are dozens of lawmakers on Capitol Hill issuing dire warnings about security and possible Chinese surveillance. On the other are some 150 million TikTok users who just want to be able to keep making and watching short, fun videos.
The leak creates more challenges for billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last October for $44 billion and took the company private. Since then, it has been engulfed in chaos, with massive layoffs and advertisers fleeing.
A nearly six-hour grilling of TikTok’s CEO by lawmakers brought the platform’s 150 million U.S. users no closer to an answer as to whether the app will be wiped from their devices.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in both the House and Senate have been moving forward with legislation that would give the Biden administration more power to clamp down on TikTok.
Employees at Facebook parent Meta Platforms and TikTok developer ByteDance were aware of the harmful effects of their platforms on young children and teenagers but disregarded the information or in some cases sought to undermine it, court filings show.
The company experienced an uptick of instability and bugs in recent months after new owner Elon Musk cut its staff sharply.
The purported “limit” has been introduced as TikTok encounters significant political pressure in the United States from lawmakers in both major parties.
The case highlighted the tension between technology policy fashioned a generation ago and the reach of today’s social media, numbering billions of posts each day.
It is not clear what caused Wednesday’s meltdown, but Twitter engineers and experts have been warning that the platform is at an increased risk of fraying since new owner Elon Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running.
Patients Choice Laboratories said Friday it was “appalled” by the comments of its employee, who sent a vulgar, threatening direct message to Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.
While account passwords were not leaked, malicious hackers could use the email addresses to try to reset people’s passwords, or guess them if they are commonly used or reused with other accounts.
The blockage came on the same day that Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita sued TikTok, claiming the video-sharing platform misleads its users, particularly children, about the level of inappropriate content and security of consumer information.
The case sprang from 2018 revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a firm with ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon, had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million users of the platform.
Musk tweeted his decision Tuesday night in response to an unscientific and unrepresentative poll he launched two days ago, which asked users whether he should step down as head of the company.
More than half of 17.5 million users who responded to a poll that asked whether billionaire Elon Musk should step down as head of Twitter voted yes when the poll closed on Monday.
Musk took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts that he described as “basically assassination coordinates.”
The advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations was formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.
The move came a day after Facebook said it would “consider removing news from our platform” if lawmakers moved ahead with the measure, a threat that publisher groups denounced.
