On Friday, the nation’s highest court heard arguments on whether to uphold or block a law that could effectively ban TikTok​ in the U.S. The bill, signed into law by President Biden in April 2024, gives TikTok’s parent company ByteDance until January 19 to divest its U.S. operations or face a ban in the country. […]

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• Streaming TV company Fubo took on Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery, and it paid off.
• The giants canceled plans for a joint sports streamer that Fubo had raised antitrust concerns about.
• Fubo struck a deal with Disney this week to settle the suit and merge with Hulu's live TV business.

Fubo took on Goliath and cashed out.

The small streaming TV company fought against media giants Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery's plans to join forces for a new streaming service called Venu that would bring together their sports content. Fubo filed an antitrust suit in 2024 that argued the companies were planning a service they had blocked competitors like Fubo from offering.

This week, Fubo struck a deal with Disney to drop the lawsuit and merge with Hulu's live-TV business. Then, on Friday, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced that they abandoned plans for the streamer.

"Had Venu happened, it would have been a threat" to Fubo, Michael Pachter, a stock analyst at Wedbush that covers Fubo, told Business Insider.

Because Venu would have been owned by three large companies with claws in the sports broadcasting industry, Pachter said a company like Fubo would have been scared of Venu's potential to get exclusive access to content and become a major space for live sports. Satellite TV competitor DirecTV also indicated it would continue the antitrust battle against Venu after Fubo's lawsuit was settled.

Now, Fubo is walking away with a sizable payday and the backing of one of the largest players in sports media. The Venu partners agreed to pay Fubo $220 million to settle the case, and Disney is set to give Fubo a $145 million loan. Not a bad outcome for a company that posted a $110 million net loss last quarter.

Fubo now has a bunch of cash to play with as it figures out its identity in this new position.

Since the Disney merger was announced on Monday, Fubo's stock has risen over 250%.

How Fubo stands to benefit from Venu's demise

Fubo, with a market capitalization of $1.7 billion compared to Disney's $197 billion, now has new pathways to grow its sports streaming business.

Fubo CEO David Gandler said during an investor call that Fubo could create "skinnier sports, news, and entertainment bundles."

On Monday, when the deal was announced, Fubo executives suggested Fox would be part of a skinny bundle as well, as BI's Peter Kafka reported.

That could create an offering similar to what sports fans could have gotten with Venu. Venu planned to charge around $43 a month for sports content from the three partners.

Fubo could also have other options to bundle its service with Disney's, on top of the merger with Hulu + Live TV. As part of the new agreement, Disney would own about 70% of Fubo.

"Fubo is going to generate a lot more sales," said Pachter. "Disney, Hulu, and ESPN brands add a lot of value to Fubo, which is not as recognizable as a brand."

CEO Gandler surprised some media observers when he first decided to challenge Disney, but the legal battle seems to have paid off.

"I was … impressed by his gutsiness," said Pachter. He acted promptly and forcefully, he had good legal advice, and it surprises me that he won but he gained a lot more respect."

• Meta's chief marketing officer Alex Schultz is concerned that "too much censorship" is harmful.
• Schultz's comments come after Meta updated several policies, including content moderation.
• The new guidelines change what is permissible to be said about LGBTQ+ people.

Meta's chief marketing officer warned that greater censorship on its platforms could "harm speech" from the LGBTQ+ community aiming to push back against hate.

Alex Schultz posted his feelings on Meta's decision to change its policy on hateful conduct earlier this week in a post on its internal forum.

"My perspective is we've done well as a community when the debate has happened and I was shocked with how far we've gone with censorship of the debate," Schultz wrote in the post, seen by Business Insider.

He added that his friends and family were shocked to see him receive abuse as a gay man in the past, but that it helped them to realize hatred exists.

"Most of our progress on rights happened during periods without mass censorship like this and pushing it underground, I think, has coincided with reversals," he said.

"Obviously, I don't like people saying things that I consider awful but I worry that the solution of censoring that doesn't work as well as you might hope. So I don't know the answer, this stuff is really complicated, but I am worried that too much censorship is actually harmful and that's may have been where we ended up."

Earlier this week, the company adjusted its moderation guidelines to allow statements on its platforms claiming that LGBTQ+ people are "mentally ill" and removed trans and nonbinary-themed chat options from its Messenger app, features that had previously been showcased as part of the company's support for Pride Month.

Schultz also said that he does not think that censorship and cancel culture have helped the LGBTQ+ movement.

He wrote, "We don't enforce these things perfectly," and cited an example of a mistake of taking down images of two men kissing and removing a slur word toward gay people rather than a deliberate move by a "bigoted person in operations."

Schultz added, "So the more rules we have, the more mistakes we make…Moderation is hard and we'll always get it wrong somewhat. The more rules, the more censorship, the more we'll harm speech from our own community pushing back on hatred."

The company's latest decision to roll back its DEI programs has sparked intense internal debate and public scrutiny. The announcement, delivered via an internal memo by VP of HR Janelle Gale, said that the company would dismantle its dedicated DEI team and eliminate diversity programs in its hiring process.

The company said Tuesday it will replace third-party fact-checkers on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads with a community notes system, mirroring the approach used on Elon Musk's platform, X.

Schulz told BI in an interview earlier this week that the election of Donald Trump and a broader shift in public sentiment around free speech played significant roles in these decisions.

He acknowledged that internal and external pressures had led Meta to adopt more restrictive policies in recent years, but the company is now taking steps to regain control over its approach to content moderation.

Meta's internal forum, Workplace, saw reactions ranging from anger and disappointment to cautious optimism about the company's direction.

One employee lamented the rollback as "another step backward" for Meta, while others raised concerns about the message it sends to marginalized communities that rely on Meta's platforms.

At Meta's offices in Silicon Valley, Texas, and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men's bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men's room and may require sanitary products, The New York Times reported on Friday.

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

You can email Jyoti Mann at [email protected], send her a secure message on Signal @jyotimann.11 or DM her via X @jyoti_mann1

If you're a current or former Meta employee, contact this reporter from a nonwork device securely on Signal at +1-408-905-9124 or email him at [email protected].

• On Meta's internal forum, its employees criticized its decision to roll back DEI initiatives.
• It follows changes to Meta's content-moderation policies, which got rid of third-party fact-checkers.
• Meta's VP of HR said the term DEI had "become charged" and "suggests preferential treatment."

Meta employees spoke out on its internal forum against the tech giant's decision Friday to roll back its diversity, equity, and inclusion program.

Staffers criticized the move in comments on the post announcing the changes on the internal platform Workplace. More than 390 employees reacted with a teary-eyed emoji to the post, which was seen by Business Insider and written by the company's vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale.

Gale said Meta would "no longer have a team focused on DEI." Over 200 workers reacted with a shocked emoji, 195 with an angry emoji, while 139 people liked the post, and 57 people used a heart emoji.

"This is unfortunate disheartening upsetting to read," an employee wrote in a comment that had more than 200 likes.

Another person wrote, "Wow, we really capitulated on a lot of our supposed values this week."

A different employee wrote, "What happened to the company I joined all those years ago."

Reactions were mixed, though. One employee wrote, "Treating everyone the same, no more, no less, sounds pretty reasonable to me." The comment had 45 likes and heart reactions.

The decision follows sweeping changes made to Meta's content-moderation policies, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday. The changes include eliminating third-party fact-checkers in favor of a community-notes model similar to that on Elon Musk's X.

As part of the changes to Meta's policy on hateful conduct, the company said it would allow users to say people in LGBTQ+ communities are mentally ill for being gay or transgender.

"We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird,'" Meta said in the updated guidelines.

One employee wrote in response to the DEI changes that, in addition to the updated hate-speech guidelines, "this is another step backward for Meta."

They added: "I am ashamed to work for a company which so readily drops its apparent morals because of the political landscape in the US."

In the post announcing the decision to drop many of its DEI initiatives, Gale said the term DEI had "become charged," partly because it's "understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others."

"Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender," she said, adding: "While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it."

One employee told BI the moves "go against what we as a company have tried to do to protect people who use our platforms, and I have found all of this really hard to read."

Meta did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Do you work at Meta? Contact the reporters from a nonwork email and device at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

• Influencers have filed a lawsuit against Capital One.
• They allege its Shopping extension hurt their earnings by unfairly claiming credit for sales.
• Capital One said it disagreed with the premise of the lawsuit.

First, the influencers came for PayPal's Honey. Now, Capital One is under scrutiny.

Capital One is the subject of a lawsuit filed this week by creators who allege the company's Shopping browser extension hurt their affiliate-marketing commissions by stealing credit for driving sales.

"We disagree with the premise of the complaint and look forward to defending ourselves in court," a Capital One spokesperson told Business Insider.

Capital One Shopping is a free browser extension that searches for discount codes and coupons, compares prices across about 30,000 online retailers, and lets users earn rewards that can be exchanged for gift cards. It makes money by earning a commission when its users purchase an item from its merchant partners.

In a class-action lawsuit filed on Monday in a Virginia court, two creators who promote products on social media allege the browser extension is designed to "systematically appropriate commissions that belong to influencers."

The lawsuit alleges Capital One Shopping "stole credit" by swapping out influencers' affiliate-marketing browser cookies with its own. Cookies are small data files stored on a user's device that help companies track users' browsing history.

The war for the last click

Much like recent lawsuits filed by influencers against PayPal over its Honey browser extension, the Capital One Shopping case homes in on the marketing practice of "last-click attribution."

In this model, cookies, unique web links, promo codes, and other analytics tags are used to determine the last piece of content a user engages with before they make a purchase. That entity, be it a YouTube video or an ad, gets credit for the purchase.

The practice has fallen out of favor in some marketing circles because it doesn't consider the full cycle of persuading someone to buy a product. There are also concerns that an intermediary may try to game the system to unfairly claim last-click credit for purchases that they had little to do with.

Companies in the affiliate-marketing industry often seek to adhere to "stand down" practices, where they won't override another affiliate's cookies.

In their lawsuit, the content creators Jesika Brodiski and Peter Hayward allege Capital One Shopping took credit for sales and conversions that were originally derived from affiliate-marketing links they shared on social media.

Brodiski shared affiliate-marketing links on social media for products on Walmart.com, and the lawsuit claims that — if a user had the Capital One Shopping extension activated during the checkout process — Capital One would remove her associated cookie and replace it with its own. The lawsuit says Brodiski earned about $20,000 through affiliate marketing in 2024 but that her earnings were hampered by Capital One Shopping.

Hayward is part of the Amazon affiliate-marketing program and similarly alleges Capital One would replace his referral tag with its own.

The lawsuit also says Brodiski and Hayward "face future harm in the form of stolen referral fees and sales commissions because the Capital One Shopping browser extension continues to steal affiliate marketing commissions with each passing day."

A court will need to certify the class action in order for the case to proceed

The plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial. If the case is certified as a class action, other influencers could join the suit.

Christopher Roberts, a partner and class-action attorney at the law firm Butsch Roberts & Associates, told BI the most difficult part of such cases is getting the class certified. The court will need to rigorously analyze various factors, such as whether the class is big enough and whether it would make more sense to litigate complicated cases individually.

Certification aside, Roberts said he felt the case would come down to what discovery showed.

"This case, on its face, is very well pled," Roberts said, "and it's pretty specific as to the code for this app being supplanted on the computer so that they can get the affiliate payment."

Life for Sleepers is fraught. They gain consciousness in a state of indentured servitude, an emulated human mind inside an android body, forced to work until they’re discarded. Those who escape don’t last long due to trackers in their bodies, and their hardcoded dependence on a drug known as Stabilizer. Without it, a Sleeper’s body will eventually reject its biosynthetic organs.

If this sounds like tech's worst excesses of the present taken to their most extreme, you're grasping what Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector's creator, Gareth Damian Martin, is driving at.

“Citizen Sleeper was me drawing on things from when I was in my early 20s,” they tell me. In the past, Martin has spoken extensively about how the time they spent as a gig economy worker informed the alienation and atomization of labor that ran through the original game, which they released to widespread critical acclaim in 2022.

“With Citizen Sleeper 2, I’m no longer looking at things from that perspective, I’m thinking a little more about how do we continue to build a future when we know that it’s going to fall apart. We know that there’s an inevitable entropy to everything, not just political systems and structures, but our lives and our physical bodies. We know it’s going to fall apart, and yet each day, we keep getting up and we keep doing things.”

For story reasons I won’t spoil, the protagonist of the upcoming Citizen Sleeper 2 has managed to deactivate their tracker and no longer needs Stabilizer, but that hasn’t made their existence any less precarious. Where Citizen Sleeper took place exclusively on a single space station, Citizen Sleeper 2 lets the player explore the Starward Belt, a location that’s referenced frequently in the first game.

With the change of locale comes a ship and crew for the player to manage, and a dramatic increase in scope. At approximately 250,000 words long, Citizen Sleeper 2’s script is nearly double the length of the original game’s. The stakes are higher too, with a corporate proxy war threatening to engulf the Starward Belt.

Jump Over the Age

Martin has been working on Citizen Sleeper 2 for nearly two years, or about the same amount of time it took them to complete the original game. All essential systems were already in place, allowing Martin to spend more time on gameplay experimentation and story writing, drawing in particular on two of the most beloved (and deeply human) space operas.

“You know, Cowboy Bebop is a really good story about the gig economy,” Martin says, laughing. “And people forget how little the characters in Firefly like each other, right? They’re more colleagues than friends, so there’s something really relatable in that.” During their days as a gig economy worker, Martin notes they met many people from different walks of life and places, and while the work pulls people apart almost by design, workers still find solidarity and human connection.

The new game inherits many of its predecessor’s gameplay systems. Each day or “cycle,” the player has up to five dice to assign to actions that can earn them money or advance the story. The likelihood of completing an action successfully depends on the die the player assigns to it. A five, for instance, has a 50-50 chance of producing either a neutral or positive outcome, while a six guarantees success. Each task also carries with it a risk factor, with negative dice rolls resulting in more severe results on “risky” and “dangerous” actions.

Then there are what the game calls “clocks,” the system that binds everything together. Most story objectives require the player to chip away at a task across multiple cycles. At the same time, there’s often a competing clock counting down the amount of time before a story deadline.

On the surface, all of Citizen Sleeper’s systems are simple, but they come together in a way that reinforces the game’s narrative. At least they did at the start. On my first playthrough of Citizen Sleeper, my character eventually earned enough money that securing Stabilizer for them was not an issue. Martin tells me that was by design.

“I knew I needed to have players on my side,” they say of the first game. “I needed to win people over. If the game was too harsh, I felt like players wouldn’t give it the time that I wanted them to give to it. This time around, I feel in a very different position.”

Jump Over the Age

Citizen Sleeper 2, by contrast, is a more confident game — in itself, and in its players to accept a certain degree of suffering. There are story beats and content the players can miss, which was mostly not true in the first game. It also features multiple difficulty settings, and on the hardest one, the player’s Sleeper can experience permadeath. (If you want to continue that save file, you need to lower the difficulty, but your Sleeper will be forever changed.)

“I didn't know how Citizen Sleeper 2 was going to end when I started making it,” Martin tells me, describing that as a “dangerous game” for a developer to play. “But because I'd made the first one, I felt confident that I could play that game, and that it would come to something really exciting.”

The intended effect of Citizen Sleeper 2 is for the player to feel like Martin is leading them through a tabletop RPG experience, like Dungeons & Dragons or Blades in the Dark. The story should feel improvised, surprising and moving.

Nowhere is that newfound confidence and TTRPG inspiration more apparent than with “Contracts,” Citizen Sleeper’s 2 signature new gameplay feature. Contracts take the Sleeper and up to two companions on jobs away from the safety of the Starward Belt’s population centers.

An early one tasks the Sleeper’s crew with diffusing a damaged corporate battle drone. In practice, that meant deactivating two separate systems on the spacecraft, with the catch being that as soon as I gained access to one system, the timer for both started ticking. Each Contract is a miniature pressure cooker, with self-contained risks that can't be relieved until the Contract is over or the player fails.

Jump Over the Age

Contracts also allowed Martin to explore one of Citizen Sleeper’s less fully realized ideas, “that the dice are the Sleeper’s body.” During Contracts, negative and neutral rolls made during risky and dangerous actions will cause the Sleeper’s stress gauge to increase — a system reminiscent of the need to obtain Stabilizer in the first game. As the gauge fills, specific rolls will begin damaging the player’s dice. Each of the Sleeper’s five dice can sustain three hits before they break; they can't be repaired until fully broken, and not until a Contract is over. Crewmates also have stress gauges, and filling them will leave them out of commission for the remainder of a Contract.

Further complicating things is that even after fixing the Sleeper’s dice, they don’t work as expected right away, due to another new mechanic called Glitch. Depending on the components the player uses to fix the Sleeper’s body, they will fill more or less of the Sleeper’s Glitch gauge. In turn, that means there’s a greater chance of a regular die being converted into a glitched one, which has an innate 80-20 chance of producing either a negative or positive outcome, and skill points do nothing to change those odds.

At first getting a glitched die feels punishing, but I think it is one of the smartest systems Martin has added to the game. The fact that glitched dice aren’t impacted by skills means they also ignore negative modifiers, which made them great for attempting tasks my Sleeper wasn’t good at, and it really felt like I was pushing my luck. In a nice touch, there’s even an achievement players can earn, an apt nod to Cowboy Bebop named “Whatever happens, happens,” when they score a positive outcome with a glitched die.

Jump Over the Age

I never felt comfortable playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the way I did with its predecessor. The game's constant surprises meant I often had to push my Sleeper’s body to its breaking point to complete some of its more challenging scenarios. In that way, Citizen Sleeper 2 is far more successful at bringing together its narrative and gameplay ambitions.

I also found the story profound and essential at a time when it feels like the world isn’t moving in the right direction. The characters of Citizen Sleeper 2 are surrounded by endless hardship, and yet they find a way to move forward.

“Is it pointless that we continue to strive to have human, meaningful relationships and build lives when we know that there are structures bigger than us that might crush us at any moment?” Martin asks me. “Or is it that, even though those structures are so big and powerful, we still live and work with a sense that we can build something and have meaningful relationships because our realities are very personal, real and direct?"

Like any good GM, Martin isn’t interested in handing anyone the answer to that question but hopes Citizen Sleeper 2 might lead them to their own.

Citizen Sleeper 2 arrives on January 31 on Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC.

• Social-media sentiment around Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has soured amid their feud.
• Lively has accused Baldoni of harassment, and he claims she tried to smear him.
• Negative posts around the stars have ballooned since Lively filed her complaint.

The feud between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni seems to have tanked public perception of both stars.

That's the key takeaway from a new analysis of social-media sentiment shared exclusively with Business Insider. The data comes from the social-monitoring firm Sprout Social, which tracks posts on X, YouTube, Reddit, and Tumblr and categorizes them as negative, neutral, or positive.

Lively's 80-page complaint, filed December 21, impressed some public-relations pros, who, in interviews with BI, called it well-timed and detailed. They said at the time it would be hard for Baldoni to come back from it. Lively accused her "It Ends With Us" costar Baldoni of sexually harassing her and engaging in a smear campaign against her. Her allegations were detailed in a The New York Times article published the same day the complaint was filed.

Baldoni hit back in a lawsuit filed against the Times, which accused the paper of libeling him and said Lively embarked on a negative PR campaign against him.

Sprout Social data showed that the volume of social-media mentions of both stars soared after Lively's complaint was filed and the Times story was published. Most of the commentary was negative, the firm's analysis found.

Lively saw negative sentiment jump 29 percentage points to 61% in the immediate aftermath of her complaint (from December 21 to 26), the data showed, compared with the period just before (December 15 to 20).

Baldoni's largely positive sentiment flipped to mostly negative, increasing 41 percentage points to 63% negative during that time.

Baldoni's lawsuit, filed December 31, as well as one filed by Lively the same day, brought a fresh round of negative sentiment on social media for both stars.

Negative sentiment around Lively jumped from 39% right before Baldoni's suit (from December 26 to 31) to 52% right after (from January 1 to Monday). Baldoni saw a similar jump, from 42% just before his lawsuit to 52% after.

The positive sentiment around both stars languished at 6% for Lively and 7% for Baldoni during the period following his suit.

In their legal filings, Lively and Baldoni accused each other of using PR pros to plant negative stories about them, supported by screenshots of conversations.

Lively's complaint alleges Baldoni's camp engaged in "astroturfing," a controversial PR tactic that involves planting online comments while making them look as if they're occurring organically.

The new data suggests that negative sentiment reached its highest point, however, after the stars went to war in legal filings and in the press.

• TikTok said it would "go dark" this month if the Supreme Court doesn't extend a divestment deadline.
• TikTok users would likely stop seeing videos after January 19, and the app would leave app stores.
• The company is arguing its case against a divest-or-ban law before the Supreme Court on Friday.

TikTok said it would "go dark" in the US later this month if the Supreme Court fails to extend a January 19 divestment deadline set by a divest-or-ban law.

During oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Friday, the company's attorney Noel Francisco said TikTok's partners, like app store hosts and other service providers, would stop working with it if its Chinese owner ByteDance fails to divest its US operations by the 19th. That would force TikTok to shut down.

"It's essentially going to stop operating," Francisco told the court. "I think that's the consequence of this law, which is why I think a short reprieve here would make all the sense in the world."

This means a TikTok ban would not only prevent the app from being downloaded but also likely block existing users from seeing videos. The app wouldn't continue operating in the US the way "Fortnite" did, for example, when Apple removed the game from its app store amid a dispute between the companies.

"This is not a dispute between two private parties," G.S. Hans, a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, told Business Insider. "This is a dispute between a private party and the government, and the government can pretty easily legally prevent a company from operating."

TikTok filed a legal challenge against the divest-or-ban law in May. The bill asked its China-based owner, ByteDance, to separate itself from the US version of TikTok within nine months or be forced to stop operating in the US. The company lost its case in the DC Circuit last month, and it's now asking the Supreme Court for an emergency injunction to pause its divestment deadline.

During oral arguments, the company pushed back on the idea that it could divest the US version of TikTok from the rest of the company. Francisco described that process as "extraordinarily difficult" over any timeline.

• A couple in Australia had their marriage annulled after the bride said she didn't genuinely consent.
• The woman said she believed the ceremony was a "prank" being filmed for Instagram.
• A judge ruled in her favor, saying it was likely the applicant believed she was just acting.

A couple in Australia had their marriage annulled after the bride testified in court that she thought the ceremony was part of a "prank" video orchestrated by the groom for social media clout.

In a family court judgment from October, which was made public this month, a judge declared the couple's December 2023 marriage void.

The bride, 24, filed for the annulment in May 2024, arguing that the marriage to the groom, in his 30s, was a sham because she did not offer real consent.

She said she thought she was merely playing the role of a bride for a video that the groom, a social media influencer with over 17,000 followers, would post on Instagram.

The Guardian Australia was the first to report on the judgment.

The bride says she thought it was a 'prank'

The couple, both originally from the same country, met on a dating platform in September 2023.

For legal reasons, their identities cannot be published.

In her affidavit, the bride said that after a brief period of dating, the groom invited her to Sydney in December 2023 to attend a "white party," instructing her to wear a white dress.

Upon arriving at the venue, she said she was "shocked" to find out for the first time that he had "organized a wedding for us."

She said she felt uncomfortable and told the groom she was leaving. However, she testified that she did not leave, and instead called a friend for advice.

The bride said the groom had told her it was a "simple prank" and that her friend assured her that she could not legally marry without a notice of intention to marry being filed.

During cross-examination, the bride testified: "He pulled me aside, and he told me that he'd organizing a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content and wants to start monetizing his Instagram page."

Video evidence presented in court showed the celebrant leading the couple through their vows. The judge said that nothing in the words used by the bride "revealed hesitation or uncertainty."

"We had to act," she said in cross-examination, "to make it look real."

The couple got engaged 2 days earlier

In his affidavit, the groom disputed the bride's account, claiming the ceremony was legitimate and resulted in a valid marriage.

He said the bride had accepted his marriage proposal, which she did not deny.

However, she said that while she did eventually intend to marry him, she didn't expect to get married so soon after the proposal — just two days later.

In her affidavit, the bride said her culture would require either her parents to be present or to grant permission beforehand.

The judge wrote, "In my view, it beggars belief that a couple would become engaged in late December then married two days later."

The judge added that a wedding celebrant had been retained over a month before the groom proposed, a notice of intention to marry had been filed in November, and the bride didn't have a single friend or family member present.

The bride said she only found out the marriage was real in February last year when the groom, who was applying for refugee status, asked to be put as a dependent on her application for permanent residency.

In concluding remarks, the judge wrote: "On the balance of probabilities, in my view it is more probable than not that the applicant believed she was acting in a social media event on the day of the alleged ceremony, rather than freely participating at a legally sanctioned wedding ceremony."

The future of TikTok is at stake and could be decided soon as the U.S. Supreme Court considers free speech arguments over a potential nationwide ban. If its China-based owner, ByteDance, doesn’t relinquish control of the app, TikTok might no longer […]

The post TikTok’s future hangs in the balance as US Supreme Court weighs free speech arguments over ban first appeared on Tech Startups.

• Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery have canceled Venu, a would-be sports streaming service.
• The companies announced the decision days after announcing plans to launch the service.
• What happened in between?

On Monday, the people behind Venu — the sports streaming service co-owned by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery — were gearing up their launch plans after solving a legal challenge.

A few days later, they decided to kill the service entirely — though it looks like what will amount to a different version of the original idea may end up launching, anyway.

Disney, Fox and WBD announced plans for Venu nearly a year ago and initially scheduled a debut in the fall of 2024. But that joint venture will never see the light of day, the three companies announced Friday morning.

The reasoning behind the astonishing decision, via sources at the three companies: the premise of even more legal challenges, which could delay the streamer even more and cost the companies time and money.

While the Venu joint venture settled an antitrust lawsuit with the streaming TV service Fubo on Monday, that decision drew immediate complaints from other TV providers, who said they were being prevented from launching a similar service.

The satellite TV services DirecTV and Dish both sent letters this week to the federal judge who had been overseeing the Fubo court case, arguing that the settlement was a "payoff" and suggesting that they would file their own suits. Other TV providers might launch similar objections, people at the joint-venture companies say.

So on Thursday, Venu's owners decided to bail completely. "In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels," the companies said Friday.

That end of Venu doesn't affect the deal Disney announced this week to essentially buy Fubo itself: It's merging its Hulu + Live TV service with Fubo and will own 70% of the company once that deal is closed.

And part of that deal will give Fubo the right to launch a new "skinny" bundle of Disney properties that show sports, like ESPN and ABC.

On Monday, when Fubo and the joint-venture partners announced a settlement, Fubo executives also told investors that they had a new distribution agreement with Fox, and suggested that Fox would be part of that skinny bundle as well.

Which would mean that Fubo would end up with the rights to sell a service that looks a lot like Venu — minus the programming WBD was supposed to provide. It seems likely that for now WBD will sit pat with its existing distribution plans — relying primarily on its TNT network, some of which also streams on its Max platform.

Which means Fubo, which a year ago was an also-ran streamer that was shut out of a crucial sports streaming deal, now seems like "the undisputed winner" of the entire mess, as an industry executive told me Friday morning.

A Fubo rep said the company had no news to announce regarding a possible Fox deal. Fox declined to comment.

What does this mean for viewers? It's hard to say: The initial announcement about the Venu joint venture seemed like a very big deal. But it was an open question whether sports viewers would pay $43 for a service that had a lot of sports — but not all the sports, including some major parts of the NFL schedule.

Meanwhile, Disney is continuing with plans to launch its own ESPN-only service this fall. And in addition to the Fubo "skinny bundle" the two companies announced, Disney has licensed a similar deal with DirecTV. All of which means there are going to be lots of ways to watch, and pay for, ESPN in the next year or so.

X is further aiming to clamp down on impersonation by rolling out a label for parody accounts to help make them distinct from the real deal. Users will now start seeing the label on posts as well as profile pages.

The company says that the goal of the label is to improve transparency, but there's a fatal flaw in how X is going about that. As it stands, the label is not yet mandatory. And as TechCrunch notes, operators of parody accounts have to apply it manually (by going to the "your account" section" in settings, then to "account information" and enabling “Parody, commentary and fan account” option).

"We’re rolling out profile labels for parody accounts to clearly distinguish these types of accounts and their content on our platform. We designed these labels to increase transparency and to ensure that users are not deceived into thinking such accounts belong to the entity being parodied," X wrote in an announcement. "Parody labels will be applied to both posts and accounts on X to clearly demonstrate the source of the content you’re seeing. We’ll share details soon on when the label will become mandatory for parody accounts."

The company added that parody accounts still have to adhere to the platform's rules, including those related to authenticity. "Parody, Fan, and Commentary (PCF) labels are selected by people on X to indicate that the account depicts another person, group, or organization in their profile to discuss, satirize, or share information about that entity," the label's description reads. "This label distinguishes these accounts to ensure they do not cause confusion for others or incorrectly imply any affiliation."

Since X isn't applying the label to accounts itself (seemingly relying on the community to flag impersonators rather than take a more active approach to moderation) and the fact it isn't mandatory yet, it's unlikely to meaningfully target the problem of impersonation. 

Scammers who impersonate, say, X owner Elon Musk in an attempt to squeeze some bitcoin out of other users won't exactly be inclined to put the label on their accounts. And those who simply don't care about having their account banned by imitating a legitimate news outlet, brand or celebrity to spread misinformation are unlikely to either. It's almost as if the entire concept of authenticity on X has been a mess ever since the company allowed anyone to buy a blue checkmark for their profile.

• A group including "Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary and Frank McCourt has submitted a bid for TikTok.
• They face an uphill battle to buy the app, with owner Bytedance still fighting a looming US ban.
• McCourt previously told BI the deal, which does not include TikTok's algorithm, faces a murky path to success.

"Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary is teaming up with billionaire Frank McCourt on a long shot effort to buy TikTok.

O'Leary and the former Los Angeles Dodgers owner are part of a group called "The People's Bid for TikTok," which said on Thursday it had submitted a bid for the video app to Chinese tech giant Bytedance.

The consortium has an uphill battle to acquire TikTok, despite the app being threatened with a ban in the US if it's not sold by January 19.

Bytedance insists it has no plans to sell the app, which has some 170 million US users, despite President Joe Biden signing a law in April setting a deadline for the app to be sold, or face a ban.

Bytedance is challenging the law in the Supreme Court after losing appeals in lower courts, claiming the potential ban from US app stores is a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech.

The court is due to hear oral arguments in the case on Friday.

President-elect Donald Trump has asked the court to pause the law that would ban TikTok until after his inauguration later this month.

Any deal to buy TikTok is complicated by the fact that TikTok's recommendation algorithm — the key to the app's compulsive scrolling — is likely covered by Chinese export rules prohibiting the sale of sensitive technology without a license.

No clarity

McCourt told Business Insider in December that the group's $20 billion-plus proposal, which would not include the recommendation algorithm, is complicated because "we don't know what ByteDance is selling."

He said that Bytedance had refused to discuss a potential sale, meaning it was "very, very difficult to have precision" over what a deal might look like.

McCourt and O'Leary's vision for the app, which is also backed by the likes of investment firm Guggenheim Securities and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, includes turning TikTok into a decentralized social media app that gives users more control over their personal data.

The group said they would aim to work closely with incoming president Donald Trump, who has previously expressed support for TikTok and met with the company's CEO last month.

Bytedance did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

• On Friday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the TikTok divest-or-ban law.
• TikTok asked the court to pause its divestment deadline, set for January 19.
• Legal experts expect the Supreme Court to uphold the law despite pressing the government on its case.

TikTok is fighting for its life as it faces a US ban set to arrive in a little over a week. On Friday, it argued its case before the Supreme Court.

The justices peppered attorneys on both sides with questions about a law that compels TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest from the US version of TikTok by January 19 or be forced to shut the app down.

Legal experts told Business Insider that TikTok's prospects remain dim.

Matthew Schettenhelm, a litigation and policy analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said he thinks TikTok's chances of a Supreme Court rescue look slimmer after Friday's hearing.

"I expect the court to deny the stay, probably soon, and also uphold the law," he told BI.

Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official and current University of Minnesota law professor, said the government "got hard questions in a way that it did not at the DC Circuit," but that doesn't mean TikTok will get a better outcome.

"I don't think that's going to be enough," Rozenshtein told BI. "I still think the most likely outcome is the law will be upheld."

He gave an 80% chance that the Supreme Court would uphold the law.

What TikTok and the government argued in court

Many of the back-and-forths in the Supreme Court hearing centered on whether a TikTok divestment was the only path to solving Congress' national security concerns and if the law violated the free-speech rights of TikTok and its users. TikTok's attorney asked why the company had been singled out in the law and why e-commerce platforms like Shein and Temu were granted exemptions.

TikTok is asking the justices to reverse a December DC Circuit decision upholding the divest-or-ban law. TikTok is also asking for a pause on its divestment deadline to give the court more time to consider its case (and give TikTok more time to potentially negotiate a political resolution).

TikTok doesn't appear to think divestment is a feasible option. During oral arguments on Friday, TikTok's lawyer, Noel Francisco, said it would be "extraordinarily difficult" to divest its US platform from the rest of TikTok globally over any timeline.

TikTok may be hoping for a solution that does not involve a sale, possibly brokered by President-elect Donald Trump, who has said he opposes a ban.

What happens next

After January 19, TikTok said it would "go dark" without court intervention as it would be pulled from app stores. Its service providers would also stop working with the company.

"It's essentially going to stop operating. I think that's the consequence of this law, which is why I think a short reprieve here would make all the sense in the world," Francisco, the TikTok lawyer, said.

Why is TikTok facing a ban?

TikTok was included in the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed in April. The act sought to limit the influence of social apps with ties to countries the US deemed foreign adversaries to guard national security interests. ByteDance is headquartered in China, which the US government has called a foreign adversary.

While members of both parties in Congress have raised alarm bells about TikTok, support for a ban among the American public has declined. Support for a government ban fell from 50% in March 2023 to 32% in July and August among US adults who responded to Pew Research Center surveys.

Donald Trump may try to save TikTok as president, as he pledged to do during his campaign run. On December 27, Trump filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to pause the deadline for a TikTok divestment so he could try to negotiate a political resolution once in office.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called out a reporter on Thursday for the lack of blame being placed on California leaders for the devastating wildfires, pointing out that it's in stark contrast to how Republican leaders are often treated in the wake of disasters.

DeSantis, and all other Republican governors, had just wrapped up a dinner with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday evening when the heated exchange with a reporter took place.

The reporter appeared to be asking another governor if it was appropriate for Trump to criticize Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom as deadly wildfires rage throughout the state.

NEWSOM CALLS TRUMP'S CLAIMS 'PURE FICTION' AFTER PRESIDENT-ELECT POINTS FINGER OVER CALIFORNIA FIRE TRAGEDY

The question prompted DeSantis to step forward and ask, "Is it appropriate for people in your industry to try to create division and to try to create narratives any time these things happen?"

"Now, you're not as interested in doing that because Newsom is a D. If Newsom was a Republican, you guys would go try ... you would have him nailed to the wall for what they're doing over there," he continued.

DESANTIS HALTS RIVALRY WITH NEWSOM, OFFERS AID TO BESIEGED BLUE STATE GOVERNOR

The Florida governor, who has managed multiple disasters during his tenure, said he has often been criticized for things that were out of his control and has been blamed for incidents before the facts came out, referencing the 2021 Surfside condominium collapse.

"I think your track record of politicizing these things is very, very bad," DeSantis said.

He said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass would be treated much differently for her trip to Ghana while fires were high risk if she were a Republican.

"You should have been there preparing and doing that, and yet I don't see a lot of heat being directed [toward her]," DeSantis said. "I'd like to see some balance on how this is done. You can criticize the president-elect, but you also have to hold these other people accountable, and I have not seen that."

ADAM CAROLLA RIPS CALIFORNIA LEADERS FOR RUNNING STATE 'INTO THE GROUND' AS FIRES RAGE: 'LUNATIC NUTJOBS'

Bass returned to Los Angeles on Wednesday, and didn't have much to say to the residents of her city outside of news conferences. While waiting to deplane, she gave the cold shoulder to Sky News reporter David Blevins, who was asking her if she had anything to say about the devastating fires.

"No apology to them? Do you think you should have been visiting Ghana while this was unfolding back home?" Blevins asked as Bass continued to look at the ground.

"Madam mayor, let me ask you just again, have you anything to say to the citizens today as you return?" he said.

As multiple wildfires rage on in Los Angeles County, California residents have been criticizing both Newsom and Bass for past decisions related to fire-prevention efforts, including Bass' decision to cut the LAFD budget by $17 million.

The wildfires have claimed at least 10 lives since they broke out on Tuesday, scorching more than 35,800 acres total and destroying thousands of homes and businesses.

Firefighters were still struggling to contain the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire – the two largest of the group – as they sit at 6% contained and 0% contained, respectively, on Thursday evening, according to data by CAL FIRE.

• Fires in Los Angeles threaten to hamper the entertainment industry's recovery.
• LA's share of film and TV jobs has declined, and some residents are thinking anew about leaving.
• One producer and director said he felt he could improve his financial situation by leaving LA.

The fires tearing through Los Angeles are a new threat to an entertainment industry that has been trying to rebound from a studio spending slowdown and twin labor strikes.

"Survive till '25" was the mantra in Hollywood for much of 2024. Now, some in the entertainment industry are wondering whether they should stick around.

"If there's no longer a need to be in LA, the question arises: Do I stay here?" asked Adam Wood, a producer and director in North Hollywood. He said the shift during COVID to remote work had made it easier to build an entertainment career outside LA. Wood hasn't had to evacuate yet, but he helped a friend leave and is monitoring conditions.

"I could improve my lot financially by not being here," he said. "LA is the spiritual home of the industry, but at the same time, it's not loving me back."

Like many in entertainment, Wood works on a freelance basis. While he feels tied to the entertainment mecca, he said he's also counting the days of work lost to the fire.

Productions and premieres have largely been paused

The fires, which had killed at least 10 people as of Thursday night, paused production on shows including Amazon's "Fallout" and CBS Studios' "NCIS," while studios from Paramount to Universal canceled premieres.

Stars including Paris Hilton and Billy Crystal have lost their homes in the tony Pacific Palisades neighborhood, which is favored for its proximity to the studios. Countless others have lost or fled their homes, with thousands of structures reported destroyed.

FilmLA, the city's film permitting office, issued a statement Thursday warning that permits in or near evacuation zones could be canceled, while new applications to film in or near these areas would be denied.

It previously said the Los Angeles County Fire Department had ordered film permits to be revoked for the communities of Altadena, La Crescenta, La Canada/Flintridge, and Unincorporated Pasadena.

Hollywood was already hurting before the fires

Before the fires, the entertainment spending slowdown had already hit the industry's biggest market hard.

Los Angeles has also been hobbled by an exodus of productions and workers to other entertainment hubs in lower-cost places like Atlanta and Miami. Greater Los Angeles' share of US-produced TV and film projects declined from 23% in 2021 to 18% in 2023, according to FilmLA.

LA accounted for 22% of US film and TV jobs in August, down from 33% two years earlier, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics figures by Patrick Adler and Taner Osman of Westwood Economics & Planning Associates.

Despite the downturn, the producer Adam Fratto said he had been feeling pretty good about the state of the industry before the fires started.

"I was taking some projects out, and who knows if they're going to sell, but the fact that TV folks were open to pitches, that's good," he said. "Before a couple days ago, I felt a little upbeat about 2025."

While it's still early to say how far the destruction could spread, Fratto said he expected the fires to cause some people to reassess their commitment to the area and industry.

"I think there will be folks who just decide to take their chips off the table and do something else or relocate," he said.

Still, Adler, the economic researcher, said he doubted LA would lose its position at the top of the entertainment industry.

"In the likes of film, television, content creation, and video games, LA has been the place where major decisions have been made, where talented people collaborate, and where deals get done," he said. "This has remained true as the city has persevered through multiple earthquakes and riots, not to mention periodic industry downturns."