Billionaire investor Mark Cuban waded into the latest government tech shake-up on Saturday, offering support on the social network Bluesky for newly laid-off federal workers whose job it was to make government tech work better. His message, which quickly gained traction, urged the displaced engineers and designers to turn the upheaval to their advantage. “If […]
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As TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains uncertain, Substack tries to lure creators to its platform by doubling down on video. The company announced on Wednesday that it’s now allowing creators to monetize their videos on the platform, and letting them publish video posts directly from the Substack app. Previously, creators have been able to […]
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When he was a senior studying at Texas A&M University, Matthew Iommi realized that there were no good options for transporting groups of people. Fellow college students heading out for the night together didn’t have access to on-demand rides with the same convenience, accessibility, and affordability of typical ride-hail platforms, like Uber and Lyft. “Once […]
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TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has been at the center of controversy in the U.S. for four years now due to concerns about user data potentially being accessed by the Chinese government. Just this past month, the app experienced a temporary outage in the U.S. that left millions of users in suspense before […]
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Apple and Google on Thursday evening restored TikTok to their respective app stores in the U.S., nearly a month after they removed the short video app following a national security law that banned it in the country. The apps were restored after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Apple a letter saying that the ban […]
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Apple and Google restored TikTok to their US app stores on Thursday night.
The app had been unavailable on the app stores since last month to comply with a law requiring it to be banned in the US unless its owner, ByteDance, divested from it.
Bloomberg reported it was restored after US Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Apple assuring the company it would not face fines for doing so.
Apple and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for Google confirmed TikTok was back in the Google Play app store.
TikTok went dark for a couple of hours in the US leading up to January 20. But it was brought back online after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his inauguration day that delayed the ban by 75 days.
Bloomberg reported the app was restored to the stores after US Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Apple and Google saying they would not face penalties for hosting it.
Apple and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for Google confirmed TikTok was back in the Google Play app store.
Trump said he would be open to Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison buying TikTok to keep it operating in the country and said that the US should own half of the app. Earlier this month, Musk said that he does not plan to buy TikTok. "I usually build companies from scratch," Musk said.
Last year, the bill to ban TikTok received bipartisan support in the House and Senate due to national security concerns with parent company ByteDance's Chinese ownership. ByteDance spent months challenging the law that required it to be divested or banned from the US before January 19.
On January 17, the Supreme Court upheld the ban.
Apple has also cut a page that listed the ByteDance apps that were taken down.
The Google restoration comes days after TikTok announced an Android package kit that allows users to download TikTok and TikTok Lite to bypass the ban.
In the week after TikTok was removed from app stores, sellers on eBay and Facebook Marketplace listed used iPhones for thousands of dollars above their retail prices, saying that the phones come with the TikTok app pre-installed.
Secondhand sellers were not the only one capitalizing on TikTok's ban. Meta-owned Instagram announced the March 13 release of a new video editing application called Edits, a direct competitor to TikTok and CapCut, a day after the TikTok ban went into effect.
Pinterest also circulated a pitch deck to woo advertisers from TikTok, Business Insider previously reported.
During TikTok's brief absence, users flocked to some alternatives, including Clapper and Chinese app RedNote.
With TikTok’s fate in the U.S. uncertain — its ban in the country has been paused, but only temporarily, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump — the ByteDance-owned company is now encouraging Android device owners to sideload its video app onto their phones and tablets. The company announced in a Friday X […]
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Lawmakers are now pushing to immediately ban the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek on government devices, citing national security concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may have built a backdoor into DeepSeek to access Americans' sensitive private data. If passed, DeepSeek could be banned within 60 days.
DeepSeek shocked the world when it debuted last month. Rumored to rival OpenAI's o1 reasoning model despite costing significantly less to develop, DeepSeek's open source model is free to download. That propelled its popularity, making DeepSeek the most-downloaded app in the US.
As DeepSeek was rapidly installed on an increasing number of US phones, research emerged yesterday suggesting that DeepSeek is linked to a Chinese telecom company, China Mobile. In an analysis shared with AP News, Ivan Tsarynny, the CEO of Feroot, revealed that DeepSeek apparently hid code that sends user login information to China Mobile.
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During Snap’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Evan Spiegel said that the uncertainty surrounding TikTok’s future has positively affected its business. “We’re not trying to draw too many conclusions from some of the engagement lift we saw when [TikTok] went dark for that brief period of time. I would say that the overall environment […]
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As a parent, I'm consumed with worry about the potential harms of the so-called phone-based childhood. Sometimes I wish I could put my own kids in a Faraday cage.
Still, as a tech journalist who has covered this topic, I know it's more complicated than just phone + social media = bad.
So I was intrigued when I came across a study by researchers at Notre Dame that found that media narratives on the issue tended to be one-sided. In other words, the stories often didn't include potential positives.
It's important to look at how news organizations might be shaping public opinion about kids and phones. Headlines drive discussions in Congress, in local governments, and on the playground. Right now, the resounding takeaway seems to be: Screens and social media are terrible for kids.
To analyze media coverage, the researchers searched 10 large news outlets for articles from 2020 to 2024 that mentioned the Kids Online Safety Act or other search terms around youth online safety. They found that all the coverage focused on potential harms, like issues with mental health, self-harm, sextortion, or screen addiction.
They also found that articles tended to focus on restrictive methods as solutions — taking away phones completely or banning phones in schools, for example.
This doesn't surprise me. Sure, there's more coverage of the harms because, frankly, there are harms! For example, a recent Pew survey found that about four out of 10 teens said they felt they spent too much time on their phones, and the US surgeon general suggested adding warning labels to social media for young people. Even TikTok discussed internal research about how quickly teens could become addicted to its platform.
But what struck me most about the Notre Dame study was a third finding: that most of the media coverage the researchers analyzed failed to include youth voices. In other words, the articles about teens often didn't quote any teens.
Karla Badillo-Urquiola, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Notre Dame, and Ozioma Oguine, a doctoral student focusing on human and computer interaction, talked to me about the paper.
Oguine said media outlets should strive for more teen perspectives.
Having written some of these stories myself, I'm guilty of this, especially when an article is about something specific in the news related to social platforms or lawmakers. But I do appreciate getting to actually hear from teens, as my colleague Kelly Burch did when she interviewed high schoolers about the TikTok ban.
Oguine said their research suggested that online safety was being viewed from a "one size fits all" kind of bucket. It also largely didn't include perspectives out of the mainstream, like from gay or minority youth.
"I think news outlets might probably want to take a look at how can we include marginalized perspectives into this conversation? What are the lived experiences of youth from marginalized backgrounds, and are there any benefits of online technologies to them?'"
As a result, the main narrative in the news about the dangers of phones and teens can lack nuance.
This doesn't mean Badillo-Urquiola doesn't believe that social media or phones can be harmful. (She does.) But their assessment of more than 150 news articles uncovered something surprising: They were all about the risks and harms, not potential benefits, of online experiences. (Their research, which focused on news items about policy, didn't include some positive stories, such as social media's ability to be a "lifeline" for LGBTQ+ youth.)
One thing the researchers observed was that coverage mainly focused on controlling screen time — taking away phones in school, for example — instead of more holistic approaches.
"A lot of the work that I am doing is sort of how do we move beyond parental mediation strategies to look at more community-based practices and creating more social and ecological supports for these youth," Badillo-Urquiola said. "That's what we wanted to look at: Is any of that coming out in any of these articles? For the most part, it's not, right? It's still very parent-focused."
This is a theme I've heard before — that putting the onus on parents to be in charge of their kids' online safety isn't fair to parents, some of whom might not have the time or knowledge to navigate a bunch of in-app controls and settings.
"The idea isn't to take away parents out of the equation," she said. "The idea is to actually give more support to parents so that they are able to make decisions."
As a journalist who's written about this stuff, I found myself slightly defensive. It's not always our job to suggest solutions to the problems we're reporting on, after all — and the idea that the media writes only about "bad news" is overly simplistic.
But there's something here — the public understanding of the topic of teens and social media is somewhere between an unprecedented public health crisis and a fake moral panic, depending on your viewpoint. This study certainly will be in my mind when thinking about how to frame future coverage.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to create a U.S. sovereign wealth fund and suggested that it could be used to purchase TikTok. The fund is expected to be created in the next 12 months by the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments, though it’s not immediately clear how. Trump has said previously […]
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TikTok needs to find a new owner for its US app to comply with a divest-or-ban law. Could it be the government?
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has repeatedly proposed that the government get some type of stake in TikTok.
"What I'm thinking about saying to somebody is buy it and give half to the United States," he said during a January 21 press conference.
In its bid to buy TikTok, AI company Perplexity AI answered Trump's call. This week, the company updated its proposal to merge TikTok's US business with its own by offering the US government half of the new entity. That's on the condition that it goes public at a valuation of at least $300 billion, a source familiar with the offer told Business Insider.
But what would happen to TikTok if the US government owns part of it? Is there a precedent for this?
While the government has controlling shares in other companies, such as Amtrak, owning a piece of a major social app would be new territory.
"It's a social-media company that has a significant platform demonstrably for political reach and communication," said Aram Gavoor, associate dean at the George Washington University Law School who focuses on issues in tech, regulation, and national security. The ownership would bring about "novel constitutional questions with regard to speech," he said.
For a TikTok sale involving the government to work, the dealmakers would need to set up editorial guardrails to prevent the US from encroaching on its users' First Amendment rights. Even then, legal analysts told BI that TikTok's content moderation, such as removing videos that violate its policies, could create an avalanche of legal challenges from the app's users.
"What would be necessary, though I'm not sure it would be sufficient, is an extremely strict separation between the government and this new TikTok entity, especially when it comes to anything editorial," said Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who previously served as an advisor at the Justice Department.
Let's walk through some of the big questions around a TikTok deal.
If the government grabs a stake in TikTok, it wouldn't be the first time it's done so in a company in a moment of flux.
During the Great Recession, the government was deeply involved in various businesses, bailing out automakers and banks and taking a controlling stake in AIG, for example.
It also owns consumer-facing institutions like the US Postal Service and Amtrak.
There is some precedent for the government's financial involvement in media companies, too. The government funds the broadcasting network Voice of America, and Congress partially funds NPR and PBS through appropriations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Each of those organizations has strict guidelines to protect editorial independence, however. NPR's ethics handbook says that its journalists have "full and final authority over all journalistic decisions." PBS said its content "must be free of undue influence from third-party funders, political interests, and other outside forces." And Voice of America has a firewall that "prohibits interference by any U.S. government official in the objective, independent reporting of news."
A version of TikTok partially owned by the government would likely need to establish similar editorial barriers as its media counterparts and provide assurances of independence.
Shawn THEW / POOL / AFP
Even if TikTok sets up contract language to keep the government out of its editorial work, it may not matter in the courts. Other government-owned entities that have attempted to define themselves as independent have faced First Amendment lawsuits and lost.
In 1994, Amtrak was sued after it tried to block a billboard from displaying political content in one of its stations. The Supreme Court ruled that the company, as a government entity, had violated the First Amendment rights of the billboard's creator.
The Supreme Court said that Amtrak, by virtue of being federally owned and controlled, "was subject to First Amendment restrictions in the same way as any other federal actor," said Jennifer Safstrom, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School who directs its First Amendment clinic.
In its opinion on the case, the court wrote that even though Congress attempted to establish Amtrak as independent from the US government, "it is not for Congress to make the final determination of Amtrak's status as a Government entity for purposes of determining the constitutional rights of citizens affected by its actions."
The case establishes that the government's self-characterization of how it owns a company may not stand on its own. "Courts will look beyond formal language to assess the extent of the government's entanglement," Safstrom said.
Many social apps block pornography and hate speech (and a ton of other stuff like content promoting eating disorders) as part of their community guidelines. But those types of expression are generally protected under the First Amendment, and a government-owned TikTok may face a flurry of legal challenges if it removes videos.
These are "uncharted waters," Safstrom said. "It's hard to know how expansive that world of litigation could be given the volume of users on that platform."
If TikTok continually gets challenged for pulling down hate speech and other unsavory content and stops a lot of its moderation work, it would be "essentially unusable and certainly very unprofitable," Rozenshtein said.
The First Amendment protects the speech of TikTok users. But what about TikTok's algorithm? If the US government owns a part of TikTok, can it limit what users see?
That question remains up in the air, as algorithm decisions may qualify as "government speech," legal analysts said.
"If the government has a platform, it's not obligated to promote every person's particular point of view," Rozenshtein said. The government often makes choices as to what content it shares or doesn't share, such as last year when the State Department worked with the private sector to promote a set of music artists internationally as part of a diplomacy initiative.
He said the postal service offers a possible comparison for understanding why the government may have more discretion over the TikTok algorithm versus users' videos. The post office gets to decide what art it features on stamps, but it doesn't have the authority to limit most of what people write in the letters they send in the mail.
Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Ultimately, there are many unknowns as to what will happen around a TikTok sale, if ByteDance opts to sell it at all. Earlier this month, TikTok's lawyer said divesting its US app from its parent company would be "extraordinarily difficult" over any timeline.
And, of course, the Chinese government could block a ByteDance deal.
Asked on January 21 about a TikTok sale, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson seemed open to letting a deal be "independently decided," though he added that "China's law and regulations should be observed."
Representatives for the White House, TikTok, and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment.
"Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP Images, Tyler Le/BI"
Tech giants have been trying to find a way to put a computer on your head — and then have people buy that computer — for years. So far, it hasn't really caught on.
Now, Mark Zuckerberg says, we're going to find out if people are really going to buy these things in meaningful numbers — or if the industry is going to have to wait even longer for the future to arrive.
"This will be a defining year that determines if we're on a path towards many hundreds of millions, and eventually billions of AI glasses, and glasses being the next computing platform, like we've been talking about for some time — or if this is just going to be a longer grind," the Meta CEO said during his company's earnings call Wednesday.
Zuckerberg has seen some promising signs that he might have figured it out. Sales of Meta's Ray-Ban augmented reality glasses, while modest compared to mainstream tech products, have been a pleasant surprise for the company — Zuckerberg called them a "real hit" on the company's call.
And last fall, Meta showed off an impressive demo version of its Orion headset, a much more powerful computer that looks like oversized glasses; the company hopes to have one that's ready for consumers to buy in the next few years.
On the other hand: Revenue for Meta's Reality Labs unit, which sells the Ray Bans along with its more cumbersome Quest goggles, remained essentially flat over the last year. Sales of $1.08 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 were up a mere 1.1% compared to the previous year.
So, it doesn't look like there's been a meaningful surge of people buying any of the devices Meta has been selling. In the meantime, Reality Labs — which also includes the company's once-hyped metaverse projects — has lost more than $60 billion over five years.
What's going to change about this year? Zuckerberg didn't get into details, except that he thinks AI will make the glasses much more compelling for many more people.
And if it doesn't happen this year, it's going happen … eventually, he insists.
"There are a lot of people in the world who have glasses," he said on Wednesday's call. "It's kind of hard for me to imagine that a decade or more from now, all the glasses aren't going to basically be AI glasses, as well as a lot of people who don't wear glasses today finding that to be a useful thing."
