“Many accounts, knowingly or unknowingly, shared images that warped the reality of what was happening on the ground. An X account with 388,000 followers called US Homeland Security News, which is not affiliated with DHS but paid for one of X’s “verified” blue check marks, posted a photo of bricks that it said had been ordered to be “used by Democrat militants against ICE agents and staff!! It’s Civil War!!” The photo actually originated on the website of a Malaysian construction-supply company. The post has nevertheless been viewed more than 800,000 times.”
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“Some online creators treated the L.A. clashes as a prized opportunity for viral content. On Reddit, accounts with names like LiveNews_24H posted “crazy footage” compilations of the unrest and said it looked like a “war zone.” On YouTube, Damon Heller, who comments on police helicopter footage and scanner calls under the name Smoke N’ Scan, streamed the clashes on Sunday for nearly 12 hours.”
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“Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said videos can play a uniquely forceful role in shaping people’s reactions to current events because they “encapsulate the emotion of the moment.”
“There’s a heavy dose of misinformation,” he added. “And, you know, people just end up getting angrier and angrier.””
“The commission fined Apple on Tuesday for preventing developers from directly informing users of deals offered outside the App Store, thereby depriving consumers of the benefits of “alternative and cheaper offers.” The commission has ordered the company to remove these restrictions on pain of additional fines. Apple has called the penalty “yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to give away our technology for free,”
On the same day, Meta was fined for offering Facebook and Instagram users a choice between free versions of the apps with personalized advertising and paid ones without advertising—something the commission calls a “pay or consent model.” In a statement, a spokesman for Meta accused the commission of “forcing us to change our business model” said this “effectively imposes a multibillion-dollar tariff on Meta while requiring us to offer an inferior service.””
JD Vance takes to Twitter to make false claims while advocating for taking away immigrants’ due process rights.
The right to due process is for all people on American soil. It doesn’t mean people suspected of being illegal immigrants get a full jury trial, but there is some appropriate process to decrease the possibility of penalizing, deporting, or sending them to a dictator who may kill them for opposing the authoritarian regime.
“Across Washington, China hawks are trying to draw a hard line against any plan that would let ByteDance maintain a degree of control of the company or insight into its underlying technology, both of which are banned by the bipartisan 2024 law passed by Congress.
But Trump is already violating that law by allowing the app to stay online. And if his promised deal goes through, Congress has almost no leverage to stop it: The law leaves final approval in the president’s hands, and lawmakers can’t take him to court even if he violates its clear meaning.
“Congress does not have standing to sue,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. He said a lawmaker can typically only file suit if they’re personally harmed by a violation.
An illegal TikTok-Oracle deal blessed by Trump would immediately join a host of White House actions that flout settled law. The Trump administration is being sued for breaking laws around deportations, civil-service protections, federal spending rules, government data-sharing and more — all of which are now playing out in federal courts across the country.
When it comes to TikTok, however, even the courts offer little recourse to enforce the 2024 law, which the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed in January.
The law requires a “qualified divestiture” of TikTok — an arrangement where ByteDance gives up all control of both the company and the powerful algorithm that runs TikTok’s video-sharing service. It can retain at most a 20 percent financial stake in the company.
The Oracle deal under discussion — a modification of a prior arrangement between TikTok and Oracle, where U.S. user data was stored on Oracle-run servers while ByteDance retained a role in TikTok’s operations — would likely flunk one or more of those tests. But it’s Trump who is ultimately empowered to declare an agreement acceptable.
“The president gets to decide what constitutes a qualified divestiture,” said Michael Sobolik, a former national security staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. “That is completely up to him, even though the contours of what needs to happen in a divestiture are spelled out in the law.”
China hawks on Capitol Hill are rattling their sabers at Trump, warning against any deal that keeps ByteDance in the room.
“The law is clear,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, wrote on Tuesday. “Any deal must eliminate Chinese influence and control over the app to safeguard our interests.”
But Moolenaar and other lawmakers have few options to stop Trump once he decides to proceed. And lawyers say Washington’s sense of powerlessness is compounded by the fact that the White House is already ignoring the TikTok law.”
“search engine optimization appears to be aiding pro-China, anti-U.S. content in a way it did not just a few months ago.
This would not be the first time China has employed such propaganda tactics on YouTube, even though the platform is banned within China. In a 2021 report, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute described how “the Chinese Communist Party uses foreign social media influencers to shape and push messages domestically and internationally about Xinjiang” — where China is committing an ongoing genocide against one of its minority populations — “that are aligned with its own preferred narratives.” The pro-Chinese government influencers mentioned in the report match some of those that come up in our search results on YouTube when searching for “China.”
In 2023, the same institute found a coordinated influence campaign originating on YouTube that was promoting pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives. A recent article in the Guardian may offer a glimpse into what is happening. It found that “After requests from the governments of Russia and China, Google has removed content such as YouTube videos.””
“Building lethality in the military may be the buzzword for the new Trump administration, but busywork and paperwork have become the reality at the Pentagon, as service members and civilian workers are facing a broad mandate to purge all of the department’s social media sites and untangle confusing personnel reduction moves.
On Wednesday, the department’s top public affairs official signed and sent out a new memo requiring all the military services to spend countless hours poring over years of website postings, photos, news articles and videos to remove any mentions that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.””
“President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday to delay enforcement of a TikTok ban by 75 days, hours after his swearing in ceremony and a day after a federal ban took effect.
His order directs his attorney general to not levy fines against app stores and service providers that continue helping TikTok stay up.”