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Today — 21 January 2025Technology

A New Group Aims to Protect Whistleblowers In the Trump Era

21 January 2025 at 19:21

The world needs whistleblowers, perhaps now more than ever. But whistleblowing has never been more dangerous.

Jennifer Gibson has seen this problem develop up close. As a whistleblower lawyer based in the U.K., she has represented concerned insiders in the national security and tech worlds for more than a decade. She’s represented family members of civilians killed by Pentagon drone strikes, and executives from top tech companies who’ve turned against their billionaire bosses. 

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But for today’s whistleblowers, Gibson says, both the stakes and the risks are higher than ever. President Trump has returned to the White House and wasted no time using the might of the state to retaliate against perceived enemies. This time, Trump boasts the support of many of Silicon Valley’s richest moguls, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who have overhauled their social-media platforms to his benefit. Meanwhile, tech companies are racing to build AI “superintelligence,” a technology that could turbocharge surveillance and military capabilities. Politics and technology are converging in an environment ripe for abuses of power. 

Gibson is at the forefront of a group of lawyers trying to make it safer for conscientious employees to speak out. She’s the co-founder of Psst, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization founded in September and designed to “collectivize” whistleblowing.

On Monday, to coincide with Trump’s inauguration, Psst launched what it calls the “safe”: a secure, online deposit box where tech or government insiders can share concerns of potential wrongdoing. Users can choose to speak with a pro-bono lawyer immediately, anonymously if they prefer. Or they can ask Psst’s lawyers to do nothing with their information unless another person turns up with similar concerns. If that second party emerges, and both give their consent, Psst is able to match the two together to discuss the issue, and potentially begin a lawsuit.

Read More: The Twitter Whistleblower Needs You To Trust Him.

Gibson says the aim is to overcome the “first mover problem” in whistleblowing: that even if several insiders privately share the same concerns, they may never find out about each other, because nobody wants to risk everything by being the first to speak up. “The chances are, if you’re a tech worker concerned about what the company is doing, others are concerned as well,” Gibson says. “But nobody wants to be first.”

Psst’s model doesn’t negate all the dangers of whistleblowing. Even if multiple insiders share concerns through its “safe,” they still face the prospect of retaliation if they eventually speak out. The safe is end-to-end encrypted, but a lawyer has access to the decryption key; an adversary could sue Psst in an attempt to obtain it. Because it’s browser-based, Psst’s safe is marginally more vulnerable to attack than an app like Signal. And while information stored in the safe is protected by legal privilege, that’s only a protection against entities who respect legal norms. Gibson acknowledges the limitations, but argues the status quo is even riskier. “We need new and creative ways of making it easier and safer for a larger number of people to collectively speak out,” she says. If we continue to rely on the shrinking group of people willing to blow up their careers to disclose wrongdoing, she adds, “we’re going to be in a lot of trouble, because there aren’t going to be enough of them.”


In her previous role at the whistleblower protection group The Signals Network, Gibson worked on providing independent legal and psychosocial support to Daniel Motaung, a Meta whistleblower who first shared his story in TIME. Before turning her focus to the tech industry, Gibson spent 10 years at the U.K.-based human-rights group Reprieve, where her title was “Head of Extrajudicial Killings.” She focused on U.S. military drone strikes in the war on terror, which reports indicate had a higher civilian death rate than Washington publicly admitted. “I spent 10 years watching national security whistleblowers risk everything and suffer significant harm for disclosing information that the American public, and quite frankly the world, had a right to know,” Gibson says. “In my opinion, we as civil society failed to really protect the whistleblowers who came forward. We tried to get accountability for the abuses based on the information they disclosed—and many of them went to jail with very little media attention.”

Gibson also noticed that in cases where whistleblowers came forward as a group, they tended to fare better than when they did so alone. Speaking out against a powerful entity can be profoundly isolating; many of your former colleagues stop talking to you. One of Psst’s first cases is representing a group of former Microsoft employees who disclosed that the tech giant was pitching its AI to oil companies at the same time as it was also touting its ability to decarbonize the economy. “The benefit of that being a group of whistleblowers was the company can’t immediately identify who the information came from, so they can’t go after one individual,” Gibson says. “When you’re with a collective, even if you’re remaining anonymous, there are a handful of people you can reach out to and talk to. You’re in it together.”

Psst’s safe is based on Hushline, a tool designed by the nonprofit Science & Design Inc., as a simpler way for sources to reach out to journalists and lawyers. It’s a one-way conversation system, essentially functioning as a tip-line. Micah Lee, an engineer on Hushline, says that the tool fills a gap in the market for an encrypted yet accessible central clearinghouse for sensitive information. “It still fills an important need for the type of thing that Psst wants to do,” he says. “[But] it’s filling a space that has some security and usability tradeoffs.” For follow-up conversations, users will have to move over to an encrypted messaging app like Signal, which is marginally safer because users don’t have to trust the server that a website is hosted on, nor that your own browser hasn’t been compromised.

Read More: Inside Frances Haugen’s Decision To Take On Facebook.

For now, Psst’s algorithm for detecting matches is fairly simple. Users will be able to select details about their industry, employer, and the subject of their concerns from several drop-down boxes. Then Psst lawyers, operating under legal privilege, check to see if there is a match with others. Gibson expects the system’s capabilities to evolve. She’s sketched out a blueprint for another version that could use closed, secure large language models to perform the matching automatically. In theory, this could allow whistleblowers to share information with the knowledge that it would only ever be read by a human lawyer in the case that a different person had shared similar concerns. “The idea is to remove me from the process so that even I don’t see it unless there’s a match,” Gibson says. 

At the same time, technological advancements have made it easier for governments and tech companies to clamp down on whistleblowing by siloing information, installing monitoring software on employees’ phones and computers, and using AI to check for anomalous behaviors. Psst’s success will depend on whether tech and government insiders trust it enough in this environment to begin depositing tips. Even if the system works as intended, whistleblowers will need extraordinary courage to come forward. With tech and government power colliding, and with AI especially getting more and more powerful, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “We need to understand what is happening inside of these frontier AI labs,” Gibson says. “And we need people inside those companies to feel protected if they feel like they need to speak out.”

Elon Musk Comments on Controversial Clip of Him Giving a Straight-Arm Salute

21 January 2025 at 04:15
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena, in Washington, DC, on Jan. 20, 2025.

Elon Musk was visibly bursting with excitement after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. At a celebratory rally on Monday at Capitol One Arena in Washington, he pumped his fist in the air and bellowed a “Yes!” to the raucous crowd. But another gesture soon after has sent observers questioning whether Musk was expressing just joy, or something more insidious.

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“I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and X owner told the audience of Trump supporters. Musk then slapped his chest with his right hand, before flinging it diagonally upwards, palm face down. He turned around to audience members behind the podium, and repeated the gesture. “My heart goes out to you,” the 53-year-old billionaire said, palm back on his chest.

um pic.twitter.com/ISwJiM4EsH

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 20, 2025

But the quick, salute-like movement drew attention as swiftly as it happened. In live commentary, CNN anchor Erin Burnett pointed the gesture out, and co-anchor Kasie Hunt noted, “It’s not something that you typically see in American political rallies.”

Social media swarmed with confusion—and theories. “WTF?? What did Elon Musk just do??” one X user asked. Streamer and leftist political commentator Hasan Pike posted: “did elon musk just hit the roman salute at his inauguration speech?”

Other users immediately drew comparison to a Nazi salute popularly used by Adolf Hitler. Public broadcaster PBS shared the clip on social media and reported it as “what appeared to be a fascist salute.” Musician and environmental activist Bill Madden posted: “If giving the Nazi ‘Sieg Heil’ salute was an Olympic event like gymnastics, Elon Musk would’ve received a perfect score of 10. Musk even nailed the facial expression. Seriously, Hitler would be jealous.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who self-identified as a “historian of fascism,” posted on Bluesky: “It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too.” Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the gesture as a “Roman salute,” and said it will “only cause greater alarm among Jews who have expressed concern with the billionaire’s proximity to Trump’s inner circle while platforming views prominent with [the] far-right.”

Rolling Stone magazine reported that neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists in America and abroad were “abuzz” after the gesture, citing celebratory captions of the clip from far-right figures such as “Incredible things are happening already lmao” and “Ok maybe woke really is dead.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) posted on X that he “never imagined we would see the day when what appears to be a Heil Hitler salute would be made behind the Presidential seal. This abhorrent gesture has no place in our society and belongs in the darkest chapters of human history.”

While speaking on stage at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Switzerland, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was asked by a member of the press about his reaction to Musk’s gesture, to which he responded: “We have freedom of speech in Europe and in Germany, everyone can say what he wants, even if he is a billionaire. What we do not accept is if this is supporting extreme right positions.” (In Germany, performing the Nazi salute is illegal.)

However, some others have come to Musk’s defense. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization whose mission is to combat antisemitism and which describes a “Hitler salute” as one with an “outstretched right arm with the palm down,” posted on X shortly after the incident that the billionaire Trump mega-donor “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute,” and that “all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath.”

Eyal Yakoby, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who campaigned against antisemitism on college campuses, called it “a stupid hand gesture” in a post on X, adding:  “Anyone trying to portray him as a Nazi is intentionally misleading the public.” 

Aaron Astor, a history professor at Maryville College in Tennessee, posted: “This is a socially awkward autistic man’s wave to the crowd where he says ‘my heart goes out to you.’” (Musk has previously disclosed that he has Asperger’s syndrome, also known as autism spectrum disorder.) Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon offered a similar explanation, adding: “We don’t need to invent outrage.”

Musk has previously been criticized for allowing pro-Nazi accounts to flourish on his platform and for posting right-wing memes and seemingly supporting antisemitic conspiracy theories, which led to an exodus of advertisers from X in 2023, and for recently supporting Germany’s far-right populist AfD party, whose leaders have made “antisemitic, anti-Muslim and anti-democratic” statements, according to the ADL.

The debate over Musk’s latest move has added fuel to other ongoing feuds, too.

Progressive firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) targeted the ADL, which has been accused by the left of turning a blind eye toward Trump and his allies, in a post on X, saying: “Just to be clear, you are defending a Heil Hitler salute that was performed and repeated for emphasis and clarity. People can officially stop listening to you as any sort of reputable source of information now. You work for them. Thank you for making that crystal clear to all.”

Staunch Trump supporter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), meanwhile, threatened PBS by saying she would call it to testify before the oversight subcommittee she chairs that is set to work with the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Musk oversees. “I look forward to PBS @NewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds,” Greene posted.

Musk did not directly address the controversy Monday night, though he replied to a number of posts on X about it—thanking the ADL, mocking Ocasio-Cortez, and agreeing with a post that said: “Can we please retire the calling people a Nazi thing? It didn’t work during the election, it’s not working now, it’s tired, boring, and old material, you’ve burned out its effect, people don’t feel shocked by it anymore, the wolf has been cried too many times.”

Musk also reposted a video clip of his rally remarks that included the moment he made the questionable gesture, commenting: “The future is so exciting!!”

—Ayesha Javed/Davos contributed reporting.

Bitcoin Surges Ahead of Trump’s Inauguration in Anticipation of Crypto-Friendly Policies

20 January 2025 at 10:00
A photo illustration of Donald Trump's X Page on a smartphone with a Bitcoin logo in the background.

WASHINGTON — The price of bitcoin surged to over $109,000 early Monday, just hours ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, as a pumped up cryptocurrency industry bets he’ll take action soon after returning to the White House.

Once a skeptic who said a few years ago that bitcoin “seems like a scam,” Trump has embraced digital currencies with a convert’s zeal. He’s launched a new cryptocurrency venture and vowed on the campaign trail to take steps early in his presidency to make the U.S. into the “crypto capital” of the world.

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His promises include creating a U.S. crypto stockpile, enacting industry-friendly regulation and even appointing a crypto “czar” for his administration.

“You’re going to be very happy with me,” Trump told crypto-enthusiasts at a bitcoin conference last summer.

Read More: What Trump’s Win Means for Crypto

Bitcoin is the world’s most popular cryptocurrency and was created in 2009 as a kind of electronic cash uncontrolled by banks or governments. It and newer forms of cryptocurrencies have moved from the financial fringes to the mainstream in wild fits and starts.

The highly volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, as well as their use by criminals, scammers and rogue nations, has attracted plenty of critics, who say the digital currencies have limited utility and often are just Ponzi schemes.

But crypto has so far defied naysayers and survived multiple prolonged price drops in its short lifespan. Wealthy players in the crypto industry, which felt unfairly targeted by the Biden administration, spent heavily to help Trump win last November’s election. Bitcoin has surged in price since Trump’s victory, topping $100,000 for the first time last month before briefly sliding down to about $90,000. On Friday, it rose about 5%. It jumped more than $9,000 early Monday, according to CoinDesk.

Two years ago, bitcoin was trading at about $20,000.

Trump’s picks for key cabinet and regulatory positions are stocked with crypto supporters, including his choice to lead the Treasury and Commerce departments and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Read More: Why CEOs Are Cheering Donald Trump’s Pick for Treasury Secretary

Key industry players held a first ever “Crypto Ball” on Friday to celebrate the first “crypto president.” The event was sold out, with tickets costing several thousand dollars.

Here’s a look at some detailed action Trump might take in the early days of his administration:

Crypto council

As a candidate Trump promised that he would create a special advisory council to provide guidance on creating “clear” and “straightforward” regulations on crypto within the first 100 days of his presidency.

Details about the council and its membership are still unclear, but after winning November’s election, Trump named tech executive and venture capitalist David Sacks to be the administration’s crypto “czar.” Trump also announced in late December that former North Carolina congressional candidate Bo Hines will be the executive director of the “Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets.”

At last year’s bitcoin conference, Trump told crypto supporters that new regulations “will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.” Trump’s pick to lead the SEC, Paul Atkins, has been a strong advocate for cryptocurrencies.

Read More: How the Crypto World Learned to Love Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Project 2025

Crypto investors and companies chafed as what they said was a hostile Biden administration that went overboard in unfair enforcement actions and accounting policies that have stifled innovation in the industry—particularly at the hands of outgoing SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.

“As far as general expectations from the Trump Administration, I think one of the best things to bet on is a tone change at the SEC,” said Peter Van Valkenburgh, the executive director of the advocacy group Coin Center.

Gensler, who is set to leave as Trump takes office, said in a recent interview with Bloomberg that he’s proud of his office’s actions to police the crypto industry, which he said is “rife with bad actors.”

Strategic bitcoin reserve

Trump also promised that as president he’ll ensure the U.S. government stockpiles bitcoin, much like it already does with gold. At the bitcoin conference earlier this summer, Trump said the U.S. government would keep, rather than auction off, the billions of dollars in bitcoin it has seized through law enforcement actions.

Crypto advocates have posted a draft executive order online that would establish a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” as a “permanent national asset” to be administered by the Treasury Department through its Exchange Stabilization Fund. The draft order calls for the Treasury Department to eventually hold at least $21 billion in bitcoin.

Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has proposed legislation mandating the U.S. government stockpile bitcoin, which advocates said would help diversify government holdings and hedge against financial risks. Critics say bitcoin’s volatility make it a poor choice as a reserve asset.

Creating such a stockpile would also be a “giant step in the direction of bitcoin becoming normalized, becoming legitimatized in the eyes of people who don’t yet see it as legitimate,” said Zack Shapiro, an attorney who is head of policy at the Bitcoin Policy Institute.

Ross Ulbricht

At the bitcoin conference earlier this year, Trump received loud cheers when he reiterated a promise to commute the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the convicted founder of the drug-selling website Silk Road that used crypto for payments.

Ulbricht’s case has energized some crypto advocates and Libertarian activists, who believe government investigators overreached in building their case against Silk Road.

China’s Vice President Meets With Elon Musk and J.D. Vance Ahead of Trump Inauguration

20 January 2025 at 08:35
Chinese Vice President Han Zheng speaks at the opening ceremony of the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing on Nov. 26, 2024.

BEIJING — China’s vice president held meetings with the U.S. vice president-elect and U.S. business leaders, including Elon Musk, in Washington on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, as the two major powers tackle ongoing tensions over trade and technology.

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Han Zheng, who serves as an envoy for Chinese President Xi Jinping at the inauguration, “discussed a range of topics including fentanyl, balancing trade and regional stability” with J.D. Vance, according to the Trump transition team.

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Read More: How Asia Is Bracing for Trump’s Second Term

Han stressed the “extensive common interests and enormous space of cooperation” the United States and China share in economic and trade relations despite “some disagreements and frictions,” according to a readout of his meeting with Vance issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday.

Trump has threatened to impose tariffs and other measures against China in his second term, while also hinting and ways in which the two rival powers could cooperate on issues such as regional conflicts and curbing the export of substances used in the production of fentanyl.

In an unorthodox move, Trump last month invited Xi to his inauguration. No head of state has previously made an official visit to the U.S. for the inauguration, according to State Department historical records.

Read More: Here’s Who’s Attending Trump’s Inauguration, From Foreign Leaders to Big Tech Executives

While Xi will not personally attend the event, he and Trump held a phone call on Friday during which they discussed trade, fentanyl and TikTok. The Chinese social media app restored service to users in the U.S. on Sunday, just hours after it went dark in response to a federal ban, which Trump said he would pause by executive order on Monday.

Han also met with Musk and other top U.S. business executives, including representatives of the U.S.-China Business Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C., according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

The Chinese vice president reiterated promises for an improved business environment for foreign firms in China and expressed hopes that U.S. companies will continue expanding investment in the country.

Musk, whose company Tesla operates a factory in Shanghai, posted on his platform X after the meeting that he has long opposed the TikTok ban “because it goes against freedom of speech.”

“That said, the current situation where TikTok is allowed to operate in America, but X is not allowed to operate in China is unbalanced,” he wrote. “Something needs to change.”

X is banned in China alongside other major U.S. social media and news apps and websites, including YouTube, Google, Facebook and many major U.S. media.

How TikTok’s Most Followed U.S. Influencers Reacted to the App Going Dark: ‘I Feel Cut Off From the World’

19 January 2025 at 19:11
TikTok Reinstates Service

When TikTok influencers in the United States opened their apps on the evening of Saturday, Jan. 18, many expected to have their last few hours of scrolling or posting. Instead, they were met with the following message: “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

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What followed was hours of uncertainty and discomfort for many high-profile TikTok users, as they sought to find alternative avenues to connect with their fanbases.

On Sunday afternoon, TikTok announced that it would begin restoring service to U.S. users that already have the app downloaded. The social media platform went on to thank President-elect Trump, who had spoken out on Truth Social hours before, stating that he planned to issue an executive order to save the app upon his return to the White House on Monday.

After the app went dark on Saturday night, TikTok’s biggest U.S. influencers reacted with a mixture of disappointment and resigned humor as they embarked on their first day without the platform. Some influencers rebounded by using other social media options, primarily Instagram.

TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, whose online fame has landed her a role on Broadway’s & Juliet, posted on Instagram reels on Saturday night: “Hey reels, how we doing? We’re here,” she said in the short upload. She later returned to Instagram to post a video of “the first TikTok dance she ever learned.”

Although D’Amelio’s Instagram audience is more than substantial—she currently has 42.8 million followers—her following on TikTok is staggeringly higher, as she boasts 156.8 million followers on the app.

Read More: Here’s What Happened When India Banned TikTok in 2020

Like D’Amelio, other top influencers used alternative social media platforms to post notes of gratitude to their followers and share nostalgic look-backs at their years on TikTok. Jojo Siwa, of Dance Moms and Dancing with the Stars fame, was among many influencers that reacted by posting old videos of themselves. Siwa, who has over 45 million TikTok followers, took to Instagram—where she has 11 million followers—to post a compilation of popular TikTok videos of herself, her caption reading: “Making this made me pretty emotional. Thank you for all the memories made.”

Spencer X—a musician and beatboxer who rose to fame on TikTok and eventually racked up almost 55 million followers on the app—also relocated to Instagram during the ban.

“TikTok forever changed my life. This is so crazy to see…” he wrote on his Instagram story to his 958k Instagram followers.  “You’ll forever be in our hearts. Thank you for everything.” 

YouTuber Larri Merrit, known professionally as “Larray,” posted videos on his Instagram story of him and fellow internet personality-turned-celebrity Quenlin Blackwell crying after TikTok stopped working for them. Larray, who has 27.5 million TikTok followers and around 6.5 million followers on Instagram, wrote that he hopes his followers will “continue to uplift and celebrate [their] favorite creators as they navigate this new chapter,” urging them to follow creators on other platforms.

@alixearle

I truly feel sick to my stomach & I cried myself to sleep last night. I love you all 🫶🏼

♬ it hurts, now that you’re gone – i don’t like mirrors

Meanwhile, Alix Earle— a TikTok and media personality known for her vlog-style content—posted a video of herself teary-eyed and emotional on TikTok before the app went dark on Saturday night. 

“I feel like I’m going through heartbreak,” she wrote for a caption displayed across the video. “This platform is more than an app or a job to me. I have so many memories on here. I have posted every day for the past 6 years of my life. I’ve shared my friends, family, relationships, personal struggles, secrets.”

“I cried myself to sleep last night,” she added.

Other influencers complained they felt “disconnected” and “cut off” from their communities when unable to access the app.

Internet personality James Charles, who got his start as a makeup aficionado on YouTube but now has over 40 million followers on TikTok posted to Instagram when his TikTok stopped working, complaining that it was “dystopian.”

“I don’t know what to do… I’ve already opened and closed the app probably six times already just to keep getting the same stupid warning message,” Charles told his 20 million Instagram followers. “I feel disconnected. I feel cut off from the world and my community…Now I’m rooting for Trump? Ew.”

TikTok went dark after the Supreme Court unanimously decided on Friday that the app’s potential risk to U.S. national security warranted a ban in the United States, outweighing anger from citizens over freedom of speech concerns and its popularity in the country.

Trump, set to be sworn in on Monday, January 20, posted on his Truth Social account on Sunday that he was “asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark.”

“I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security,” he wrote. “The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

TikTok Restores U.S. Service Despite Legal Ban, Citing ‘Trump’s Efforts’

19 January 2025 at 11:05
TikTok is back in USA

TikTok restored service to users in the United States on Sunday just hours after the popular video-sharing platform went dark in response to a federal ban, which President-elect Donald Trump said he would try to pause by executive order on his first day in office.

Trump said he planned to issue the order to give TikTok’s China-based parent company more time to find an approved buyer before the ban takes full effect. He announced the move on his Truth Social account as millions of U.S. TikTok users awoke to discover they could no longer access the TikTok app or platform.

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But by Sunday afternoon, a message greeted those who signed on thanking them—and the president-elect—for their support.

“As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the message read.

TikTok said it shut down the platform late Saturday because of a federal law that required parent company ByteDance to sell its U.S. operation by Sunday. Google and Apple also removed TikTok from their digital stores. The law, which passed with wide bipartisan support in April, allows for steep fines.

While the company that runs TikTok in the U.S. said on X that the steps Trump outlined Sunday provided “the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties,” the TikTok app remained unavailable for download in Apple and Google’s app stores.

“It was a brilliant marketing stunt for both TikTok and incoming president Donald Trump,” Jasmine Enberg, an analyst with market research firm Emarketer, said. “By abruptly shutting off service, TikTok proved how unpopular the ban was among its users.”

Why was TikTok banned? What can Trump do about it?

The law that took effect Sunday required ByteDance to cut ties with the platform’s U.S. operations due to national security concerns. However, the statute authorized the sitting president to grant a 90-day extension if a viable sale was underway.

Although investors made some offers, ByteDance has said it would not sell. Trump said his order would “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect” and “confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how Trump’s promised action would fare from a legal standpoint since the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ban on Friday and the statute came into force the day before Trump’s return to the White House. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin and the bill’s author, said on Fox News Sunday that “there is no extension” for TikTok.

“Let me tell you, as the person who wrote the bill, the extension was within the 270-day window, which closed at 12:01 a.m. this morning,” he said, adding that only if the president certifies there are “legally binding documents” showing a divestiture is on the way would there be an extension.

“I think Trump can at least make an argument that the language is meant to cover any president,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said.

Some lawmakers who voted for the sale-or-ban law, including some of Trump’s fellow Republicans, remain in favor of it. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas warned companies Sunday not to provide TikTok with technical support.

“Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law,” Cotton wrote on X. “Think about it.”

Constitutional and business law attorney Kirk McGill said he thinks Trump lacks the legal authority to suspend the ban but it’s unlikely the question would reach a court in the time it might take TikTok to find a buyer.

It’s also unlikely that Apple or Google will face legal consequences if they move forward with Trump’s demands, given that his administration would have to initiate any prosecutions, McGill said.

“In the next week or two, before the courts have the chance to do anything, this is certainly going to be a political fight, not a legal one,” McGill said.

TikTok shuts off—but only temporarily?

The on-and-off availability of TikTok came after the Supreme Court ruled that the risk to national security posed by TikTok’s ties to China outweighed concerns about limiting speech by the app or its millions of U.S. users.

When TikTok users in the U.S. tried to watch or post videos on the platform as of Saturday night, they saw a pop-up message under the headline, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.”

“A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.,” the message said. “Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

The app was removed late Saturday from prominent app stores and remained so as of Sunday afternoon. Apple told customers it also took down other apps developed by ByteDance. They included Lemon8, which some influencers had promoted as a TikTok alternative, the popular video editing app CapCut and photo editor Hypic.

“Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates,” the company said.

Google declined to comment. Apple did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the day’s developments.

Experts had said the law as written did not require TikTok to take down its platform, only for app stores to remove it. Current users expected to continue to have access to videos until a lack of updates caused the app to stop working.

After TikTok was back online Sunday, content creator Tiffany Watson, 20, said she was “pretty hopeful” it would stay up. At the same time, Watson said her dedication “solely” to the platform declined during the months the threat of a ban loomed.

“Overall, I hope that creators will succeed and find community in spite of the unpredictability of TikTok,” she said.

Will the ban’s timing help TikTok?

Trump’s plan to spare TikTok on his first day in office reflected the ban’s coincidental timing and the unusual mix of political considerations surrounding a social media platform that first gained popularity with often silly videos featuring dances and music clips.

During his first presidential term, Trump in 2020 issued executive orders banning dealings with ByteDance and the owners of the Chinese messaging app WeChat, moves that courts subsequently blocked.

Trump has since credited TikTok with helping him win support from young voters in last year’s presidential election. TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration with a prime seating location.

Trump’s choice for national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told CBS News on Sunday that the president-elect discussed TikTok during a weekend call with Chinese President Xi Jinping “and they agreed to work together on this.”

The Biden administration has also stressed in recent days that it did not intend to implement or enforce the ban before Trump takes office on Monday.

Who are possible buyers of TikTok?

ByteDance has publicly insisted it would not sell TikTok, and no likely buyer has emerged.

On Saturday, artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI submitted a proposal to ByteDance to create a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Perplexity is not asking to purchase the ByteDance algorithm that feeds TikTok user’s videos based on their interests.

In Washington, lawmakers and administration officials have long warned that the algorithm is vulnerable to manipulation by China. To date, the U.S. has not publicly provided evidence of TikTok providing user data to Chinese authorities or tinkering with the algorithm to benefit Chinese interests.

Another unknown is whether Trump will remain a TikTok fan.

“He’s flip-flopped on his stance toward TikTok before, and there’s no guarantee he won’t do so again,” EMarketer’s Enberg said.

—Kanis Leung in Hong Kong and Charlotte Kramon in Atlanta, Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas, and Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, contributed to this story.

Trump Says He Will ‘Most Likely’ Give TikTok a 90-Day Extension to Avoid U.S. Ban

18 January 2025 at 18:59
Donald Trump

President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that he “most likely” would give TikTok 90 more days to work out a deal that would allow the popular video-sharing platform to avoid a U.S. ban.

Trump said in an NBC News interview that he had not decided what to do but was considering granting TikTok a reprieve after he is sworn into office on Monday. A law that prohibits mobile app stores and internet hosting services from distributing TikTok to U.S. users takes effect on Sunday.

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Under the law passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden last year, TikTok’s China-based parent company had nine months to sell the platform’s U.S. operation to an approved buyer. The law allows the sitting president to grant an extension if a sale is in progress.

“I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at. The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone interview. “We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation.

“If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday,” he said.

Both White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made clear Friday that the Biden administration would leave the law’s implementation to Trump given that his inauguration falls the day after the ban takes effect.

In a statement later Friday, TikTok asked for “a definitive statement” saying the Biden administration would not enforce the law or try to fine app store operators like Apple and Google and other U.S. companies if they don’t stop making TikTok available Sunday.

Without those assurances, TikTok said it “will be forced to go dark.” But the company did not provide details, including whether it would voluntarily shut down its U.S. platform at midnight or suspend its operations after losing access to service providers it relies on.

The White House on Saturday called TikTok’s statement “a stunt.”

“We see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump administration takes office on Monday,” Jean-Pierre said. “We have laid out our position clearly and straightforwardly: actions to implement this law will fall to the next administration. So TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them.”

Neither Apple, Google or Oracle, which hosts TikTok’s data on its servers, have responded to questions about what they plan to do on Sunday.

Here’s What Happened When India Banned TikTok in 2020

18 January 2025 at 17:24
TikTok India

When Congress passed a bill in April 2024 ordering ByteDance to either sell TikTok or face a ban, many speculated that ByteDance would opt to sell, because the American market was too valuable to relinquish freely. But TikTok actually faced an even bigger exodus of users in 2020, when India banned the app.

At the time, India was TikTok’s biggest foreign market outside of China, with 200 million users. (For comparison, the U.S. currently has over 170 million TikTok users.) Following military clashes along the disputed border between India and China, the Indian government banned TikTok along with over 50 other Chinese apps, citing national security concerns.

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Despite the ban, TikTok did just fine in expanding around the world, while national and international tech companies rushed to fill the Indian void, in the process transforming their global approaches to social media. At the same time, digital rights activists tell TIME that the Indian government used the ban as precedent to crack down upon other digital platforms they deemed to be a threat. The way that users, tech giants, the government, and TikTok all adapted to the ban offer clues about what could unfold in the U.S. in the coming months.

Read More: How TikTok’s Most Followed U.S. Influencers Reacted to the App Going Dark: ‘I Feel Cut Off From the World’

Post-ban opportunity

Indian users flocked to TikTok as early as 2017. Video was already a dominant format in the country, buoyed by massive 4G and 5G infrastructure projects that allowed people with smartphones in remote villages to stream content. TikTok took that ecosystem even farther, allowing India’s millions of regional dialect speakers to share content and create digital communities. (At the same time, caste-based hate speech grew rapidly on the platform.) 

“A lot of the people in the rural part of the country were okay with just being themselves, and creating a 15-second clip of some song they liked,” says Murli Kanne, an entrepreneur based in Hyderabad, India, who was working in influencer marketing at the time. “People started getting followers really easily. Hindi was mostly the language used in the viral TikToks, but a lot of regional content popped up as well.” 

When the Indian government banned TikTok in June 2020, some influencers striving for global fame started using VPNs to post on TikTok. But for the millions and millions of smaller-scale users, local companies rushed to meet their demand, including MX TakaTak, Chingari, and Moj—which was launched in July 2020 by the Indian social media powerhouse ShareChat, registered over one million downloads within a week. In November 2020, at least 13 of the top 100 social apps in the Google Play Store in India were TikTok clones, with most of them newly launched, Rest of World reported. Many of these apps offered money to influencers to post on their platforms. The Indian government encouraged these efforts by issuing an Innovation Challenge to build local versions of banned apps. 

Read More: Will You Still Be Able to Use TikTok If It’s Banned? Here’s What You Need to Know

Big Tech takes over

But as these local apps fought for market share, they were about to fall behind much larger and more-resourced American competitors. “A few of these apps were not up to the mark when we compare tech,” Kanne says. “I don’t think they had a chance with the giants against them.” 

YouTube was already a hugely popular platform in India. Within months of the TikTok ban, its parent company Alphabet launched a beta version of YouTube Shorts in the country. And because audiences were already on the platform, many Indian content creators found instant success with Shorts. Comedy creator Dushyant Kukreja found that his Shorts received similar levels of views as his TikTok videos, and he soon grew his YouTube following from 40,000 to over 6 million. Creator Manjusha Martin, who had built a TikTok audience of over 770,000, created a web series on Shorts, surpassing 2 million followers on that platform. 

Buoyed by this success, YouTube soon expanded Shorts to dozens more countries. By the summer of 2022, they reported 1.5 billion viewers every month, rivaling TikTok’s viewership. 

Instagram, not to be outdone, pushed out its Reels feature in August 2020, and made India the first country to have a version of the app with Reels in a separate tab. Indians tuned into watch music and cricket, with over 1 million reels created related to the 2022 ICC T20 World Cup. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Reels made up more than 20% of the time people spent on Instagram, making it the company’s “fastest-growing content format by far.”

Ultimately, most of the Indian-based TikTok alternatives folded, and Indian audiences and creators got used to Shorts and Reels. The scrappy and broadly rural culture of TikTok in India winnowed down into a more top-down influencer culture on those two platforms. India is now the biggest market for both YouTube (almost 500 million monthly users) and Instagram (362 million). 

Global competition and privacy concerns

Although the Indian userbase was a significant loss for TikTok, the company simply expanded across the world. Research shows that TikTok’s userbase essentially doubled between 2020 and 2024. And the U.S. wasn’t even the main driver of this uptick: Indonesia has the most TikTok users in the world. (Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam also have sizable audiences.) TikTok’s current dominance across continents, and its proven ability to rebound from previous massive bans, mean that ByteDance is likely in no hurry to sell the app. Rather, it will likely simply continue its expansion abroad, and hope that America’s political situation changes. 

Meta and YouTube, meanwhile, have a huge opportunity to grow, just like they did in India in 2020. And this time, they have a huge headstart, because Reels and Shorts are already a key part of American social media. 

However, many Americans have expressed the desire for new platforms—as evidenced by the flood of TikTokers to the Chinese app Red Note over the past week. “Unless you pay Meta to promote your posts, they’re not really going to show it to people,” Christina Shuler, a South Carolina-based entrepreneur who recently signed up for Red Note, tells TIME. “And Facebook is just a bunch of angry people on there. So it was refreshing to get on Red Note and know that my content was appreciated.” 

As users search for a new landing spot, digital rights activists view these TikTok bans from a more ominous perspective. Raman Jit Singh Chima, the Asia-Pacific policy director at Access Now, says that India’s TikTok ban led to an increase in the government censorship of digital content. Over the last couple months, VPN apps have been disappearing from the country’s app stores, seemingly for not complying with local rules. “The ban has built a precedent that has allowed the Indian government to continue blocking access to more web and social media content, including very often content posted by journalists or critics of the Administration,” Chima claims.

U.S.-based activists worry that the same thing could happen following the U.S. ban, especially given that the Supreme Court upheld it, giving the green light for Congress to put pressure on other social media apps they deem dangerous going forward. Other countries may follow suit and issue their own bans, as well. “

We are disappointed to see the Court sweep past the undisputed content-based justification for the law—to control what speech Americans see and share with each other—and rule only based on the shaky data privacy concerns,” David Greene, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a statement emailed to TIME.

Everything Trump Has Said About the TikTok Ban 

17 January 2025 at 21:24
FRANCE-SOCIETE-ILLUSTRATION-SMARTPHONE-INTERDICTION-TIKTOK-SOCIA

The fate of Tiktok is now in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump after the Supreme Court upheld the ban on the viral video app Friday. The Biden Administration announced it would not enforce the ban, which was set to go into effect on Sunday, Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. 

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“The Supreme Court decision was expected, and everyone must respect it,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Friday. “My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation.”

Trump previously asked the Supreme Court to pause the ban from going into effect so his Administration could look for a “political resolution.” But the President-elect’s current position on TikTok is a reverse from his 2020 stance, when Trump sought to ban TikTok. A federal judge blocked the act in December 2020. “You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points and there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with it,” Trump said in a post-election news conference in December.

The U.S. first began investigating TikTok in 2019, two years after the Chinese company ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, which was then merged into TikTok.

The ban comes after President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan law last April forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to divest from the app or be banned in the U.S. citing national security concerns given the app’s connections to China. During Supreme Court arguments, Department of Justice Solicitor General Elizaveth Prelogar claimed China could harvest the data of U.S. users which could then be used to harass, rescruit, and spy on the United States. ByteDance has said that it will not sell TikTok and claimed that the law infringes on the First Amendment rights of the company and the 170 million American users.

“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” the court said in its decision. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”

In a statement Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that given the timing of the ban, “actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday.” 

Earlier on Friday, Trump announced that he had spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the two talked about TikTok, along with other topics. “President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe,” he said. 

Negotiations regarding the future of the social media platform appear to be in motion. In December, Trump met with TikTok CEO Shou Chew. While the Supreme Court result did not fall in favor with the desires of TikTok executives, Chew still thanked Trump for his “commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” in a video posted after the Supreme Court decision Friday, in which he shared that there had been more than 60 billion views of Trump’s content on the app. Chew also shared that the company was still working hard to ensure the app would still be available to its users in the U.S.

“TikTok itself is a fantastic platform,” Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for a national security adviser,  told Fox News Special Report with Bret Baier on Wednesday. “We’re going to find a way to preserve it but protect people’s data.”

Supreme Court Upholds Law Banning TikTok

17 January 2025 at 16:26
Supreme Court TikTok

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it’s sold by its China-based parent company, holding that the risk to national security posed by its ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in the United States.

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A sale does not appear imminent and, although experts have said the app will not disappear from existing users’ phones once the law takes effect on Jan. 19, new users won’t be able to download it and updates won’t be available. That will eventually render the app unworkable, the Justice Department has said in court filings.

The decision came against the backdrop of unusual political agitation by President-elect Donald Trump, who vowed that he could negotiate a solution and the administration of President Joe Biden, which has signaled it won’t enforce the law beginning Sunday, his final full day in office.

Trump, mindful of TikTok’s popularity, and his own 14.7 million followers on the app, finds himself on the opposite side of the argument from prominent Senate Republicans who fault TikTok’s Chinese owner for not finding a buyer before now. Trump said in a Truth Social post shortly before the decision was issued that TikTok was among the topics in his conversation Friday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

It’s unclear what options are open to Trump once he is sworn in as president on Monday. The law allowed for a 90-day pause in the restrictions on the app if there had been progress toward a sale before it took effect. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who defended the law at the Supreme Court for the Democratic Biden administration, told the justices last week that it’s uncertain whether the prospect of a sale once the law is in effect could trigger a 90-day respite for TikTok.

“Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary,” the court said in an unsigned opinion, adding that the law “does not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch filed short separate opinions noting some reservations about the court’s decision but going along with the outcome.

“Without doubt, the remedy Congress and the President chose here is dramatic,” Gorsuch wrote. Still, he said he was persuaded by the argument that China could get access to “vast troves of personal information about tens of millions of Americans.”

Some digital rights groups slammed the court’s ruling shortly after it was released.

“Today’s unprecedented decision upholding the TikTok ban harms the free expression of hundreds of millions of TikTok users in this country and around the world,” said Kate Ruane, a director at the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology, which has supported TikTok’s challenge to the federal law.

Content creators who opposed the law also worried about the effect on their business if TikTok shuts down. “I’m very, very concerned about what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks,” said Desiree Hill, owner of Crown’s Corner mechanic shop in Conyers, Georgia. “And very scared about the decrease that I’m going to have in reaching customers and worried I’m going to potentially lose my business in the next six months.”

At arguments, the justices were told by a lawyer for TikTok and ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese technology company that is its parent, how difficult it would be to consummate a deal, especially since Chinese law restricts the sale of the proprietary algorithm that has made the social media platform wildly successful.

The app allows users to watch hundreds of videos in about half an hour because some are only a few seconds long, according to a lawsuit filed last year by Kentucky complaining that TikTok is designed to be addictive and harms kids’ mental health. Similar suits were filed by more than a dozen states. TikTok has called the claims inaccurate.

The dispute over TikTok’s ties to China has come to embody the geopolitical competition between Washington and Beijing.

“ByteDance and its Chinese Communist masters had nine months to sell TikTok before the Sunday deadline,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote on X. “The very fact that Communist China refuses to permit its sale reveals exactly what TikTok is: a communist spy app. The Supreme Court correctly rejected TikTok’s lies and propaganda masquerading as legal arguments.”

The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.

TikTok points out the U.S. has not presented evidence that China has attempted to manipulate content on its U.S. platform or gather American user data through TikTok.

Bipartisan majorities in Congress passed legislation and Biden signed it into law in April. The law was the culmination of a yearslong saga in Washington over TikTok, which the government sees as a national security threat.

TikTok, which sued the government last year over the law, has long denied it could be used as a tool of Beijing. A three-judge panel made up of two Republican appointees and a Democratic appointee unanimously upheld the law in December, prompting TikTok’s quick appeal to the Supreme Court.

Without a sale to an approved buyer, the law bars app stores operated by Apple, Google and others from offering TikTok beginning on Sunday. Internet hosting services also will be prohibited from hosting TikTok.

ByteDance has said it won’t sell. But some investors have been eyeing it, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire businessman Frank McCourt. McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative has said it and its unnamed partners have presented a proposal to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets. The consortium, which includes “Shark Tank” host Kevin O’Leary, did not disclose the financial terms of the offer.

McCourt, in a statement following the ruling, said his group was “ready to work with the company and President Trump to complete a deal.”

Prelogar told the justices last week that having the law take effect “might be just the jolt” ByteDance needs to reconsider its position.

___

Associated Press writers Haleluya Hadero, Mae Anderson and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report. Hadero reported from South Bend, Indiana, and Anderson from New York.

The Biggest Moments from the 2025 TIME100 Dinner in Davos

20 January 2025 at 23:20

Leaders from across the world of business, technology, policy, and entertainment gathered at the TIME100 Davos Dinner as the World Economic Forum’s 55th annual meeting kicked off on Jan. 20. In keeping with this year’s annual meeting theme “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age,” Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of AI company Anthropic, joined TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs on stage to talk about the future of AI. 

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Discussing what Amodei calls powerful AI, which he prefers over Artificial General Intelligence because of the latter’s connotations with science fiction, the CEO emphasized the importance of understanding the reality of the technology’s potential. “We have to be very serious about when this actually happens, what is possible and what exists. What are the bounds that are provided by physics, by the limits in human institutions, what’s left after we consider those,” he said. “Those barriers really will be truly radical, but it will have limits, and it’s high time that we start thinking about that. Almost none of that is in the public conversation.”

The event was held just after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term in the White House in Washington, D.C.. His inauguration was attended by billionaire Elon Musk, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple boss Tim Cook, and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai. 

Elaborating on his previous comments about the influence of industrialists on government, Amodei said, “We’re probably hitting similar levels of wealth concentration as we had in the mid-to-late 19th century. I think John Rockefeller, his wealth was equivalent to something like 1.5% of the U.S. GDP in the late 19th century. We’re now reaching that rate with Elon Musk as well. And I do have a concern that, without intervention, AI will make that even more extreme, make it five or 10 times more extreme, and I think that is undesirable.”

Looking forward to AI developments he expects in the year ahead, Amodei predicted the rise of “virtual collaborators” that operate “a lot like a co-worker.” 

Read More: How the Rise of New Digital Workers Will Lead to an Unlimited Age

“There’s going to be a lot of debate about how to use them, the economic value that they create. But also, are they safe? Are they wreaking havoc? And perhaps most important of all, what about the human economy? What about job displacement?” he said.

While Amodei was the keynote speaker at the TIME 100 Davos dinner, other leaders gave toasts about how they think new technology can help the world. Obiageli Ezekwesili, president of Human Capital Africa and former vice president at the World Bank for the Africa region, shared her hopes for the potential of technology in the continent. “Whereas Africa missed out on the agrarian revolution, missed out on the industrial revolution, which remarkably transformed our societies in the world, Africa is on board the train for information and communication technology,” she said, “and with even brighter hopes through artificial intelligence. 

She said that in Africa, “Technology is leveling a playing field, ensuring that talent and determination, not privilege, is basically driving success.” She also spoke about how technology is unleashing the talents of women and young people in Africa, “amplifying their points, scaling their ideas and connecting their efforts to economic opportunities beyond their others.”

Read More: 5 Predictions for AI in 2025

Speaking about what gives her hope, Gita Gopinath, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said, “I’m increasingly optimistic, even though it’s not an unmitigated blessing, that technology can help” with the three challenges of weak economic growth around the world, climate change, and aging demographics.

Yulia Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Ukraine, made a call to be “brave enough to take action to stop aggression” during her toast. “In the Ukrainian language, the word ‘freedom’ has one more meaning: it’s ‘will,’” she said. “So if we want true freedom, we must have will for peace, will for security guarantee, will for sanction policy, will for mutual support, will to invest in Ukraine and strengthen our economy, and will to make the right choice for the future of our country.”

The TIME100 Davos Dinner was presented by SOMPO, Diriyah Company, Technology Innovation Institute, Brandi, and Fortescue.

Yesterday — 20 January 2025Technology

Bitcoin Surges Ahead of Trump’s Inauguration in Anticipation of Crypto-Friendly Policies

20 January 2025 at 10:00
A photo illustration of Donald Trump's X Page on a smartphone with a Bitcoin logo in the background.

WASHINGTON — The price of bitcoin surged to over $109,000 early Monday, just hours ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, as a pumped up cryptocurrency industry bets he’ll take action soon after returning to the White House.

Once a skeptic who said a few years ago that bitcoin “seems like a scam,” Trump has embraced digital currencies with a convert’s zeal. He’s launched a new cryptocurrency venture and vowed on the campaign trail to take steps early in his presidency to make the U.S. into the “crypto capital” of the world.

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His promises include creating a U.S. crypto stockpile, enacting industry-friendly regulation and even appointing a crypto “czar” for his administration.

“You’re going to be very happy with me,” Trump told crypto-enthusiasts at a bitcoin conference last summer.

Read More: What Trump’s Win Means for Crypto

Bitcoin is the world’s most popular cryptocurrency and was created in 2009 as a kind of electronic cash uncontrolled by banks or governments. It and newer forms of cryptocurrencies have moved from the financial fringes to the mainstream in wild fits and starts.

The highly volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, as well as their use by criminals, scammers and rogue nations, has attracted plenty of critics, who say the digital currencies have limited utility and often are just Ponzi schemes.

But crypto has so far defied naysayers and survived multiple prolonged price drops in its short lifespan. Wealthy players in the crypto industry, which felt unfairly targeted by the Biden administration, spent heavily to help Trump win last November’s election. Bitcoin has surged in price since Trump’s victory, topping $100,000 for the first time last month before briefly sliding down to about $90,000. On Friday, it rose about 5%. It jumped more than $9,000 early Monday, according to CoinDesk.

Two years ago, bitcoin was trading at about $20,000.

Trump’s picks for key cabinet and regulatory positions are stocked with crypto supporters, including his choice to lead the Treasury and Commerce departments and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Read More: Why CEOs Are Cheering Donald Trump’s Pick for Treasury Secretary

Key industry players held a first ever “Crypto Ball” on Friday to celebrate the first “crypto president.” The event was sold out, with tickets costing several thousand dollars.

Here’s a look at some detailed action Trump might take in the early days of his administration:

Crypto council

As a candidate Trump promised that he would create a special advisory council to provide guidance on creating “clear” and “straightforward” regulations on crypto within the first 100 days of his presidency.

Details about the council and its membership are still unclear, but after winning November’s election, Trump named tech executive and venture capitalist David Sacks to be the administration’s crypto “czar.” Trump also announced in late December that former North Carolina congressional candidate Bo Hines will be the executive director of the “Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets.”

At last year’s bitcoin conference, Trump told crypto supporters that new regulations “will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.” Trump’s pick to lead the SEC, Paul Atkins, has been a strong advocate for cryptocurrencies.

Read More: How the Crypto World Learned to Love Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Project 2025

Crypto investors and companies chafed as what they said was a hostile Biden administration that went overboard in unfair enforcement actions and accounting policies that have stifled innovation in the industry—particularly at the hands of outgoing SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.

“As far as general expectations from the Trump Administration, I think one of the best things to bet on is a tone change at the SEC,” said Peter Van Valkenburgh, the executive director of the advocacy group Coin Center.

Gensler, who is set to leave as Trump takes office, said in a recent interview with Bloomberg that he’s proud of his office’s actions to police the crypto industry, which he said is “rife with bad actors.”

Strategic bitcoin reserve

Trump also promised that as president he’ll ensure the U.S. government stockpiles bitcoin, much like it already does with gold. At the bitcoin conference earlier this summer, Trump said the U.S. government would keep, rather than auction off, the billions of dollars in bitcoin it has seized through law enforcement actions.

Crypto advocates have posted a draft executive order online that would establish a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” as a “permanent national asset” to be administered by the Treasury Department through its Exchange Stabilization Fund. The draft order calls for the Treasury Department to eventually hold at least $21 billion in bitcoin.

Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has proposed legislation mandating the U.S. government stockpile bitcoin, which advocates said would help diversify government holdings and hedge against financial risks. Critics say bitcoin’s volatility make it a poor choice as a reserve asset.

Creating such a stockpile would also be a “giant step in the direction of bitcoin becoming normalized, becoming legitimatized in the eyes of people who don’t yet see it as legitimate,” said Zack Shapiro, an attorney who is head of policy at the Bitcoin Policy Institute.

Ross Ulbricht

At the bitcoin conference earlier this year, Trump received loud cheers when he reiterated a promise to commute the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the convicted founder of the drug-selling website Silk Road that used crypto for payments.

Ulbricht’s case has energized some crypto advocates and Libertarian activists, who believe government investigators overreached in building their case against Silk Road.

China’s Vice President Meets With Elon Musk and J.D. Vance Ahead of Trump Inauguration

20 January 2025 at 08:35
Chinese Vice President Han Zheng speaks at the opening ceremony of the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing on Nov. 26, 2024.

BEIJING — China’s vice president held meetings with the U.S. vice president-elect and U.S. business leaders, including Elon Musk, in Washington on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, as the two major powers tackle ongoing tensions over trade and technology.

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Han Zheng, who serves as an envoy for Chinese President Xi Jinping at the inauguration, “discussed a range of topics including fentanyl, balancing trade and regional stability” with J.D. Vance, according to the Trump transition team.

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Read More: How Asia Is Bracing for Trump’s Second Term

Han stressed the “extensive common interests and enormous space of cooperation” the United States and China share in economic and trade relations despite “some disagreements and frictions,” according to a readout of his meeting with Vance issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday.

Trump has threatened to impose tariffs and other measures against China in his second term, while also hinting and ways in which the two rival powers could cooperate on issues such as regional conflicts and curbing the export of substances used in the production of fentanyl.

In an unorthodox move, Trump last month invited Xi to his inauguration. No head of state has previously made an official visit to the U.S. for the inauguration, according to State Department historical records.

Read More: Here’s Who’s Attending Trump’s Inauguration, From Foreign Leaders to Big Tech Executives

While Xi will not personally attend the event, he and Trump held a phone call on Friday during which they discussed trade, fentanyl and TikTok. The Chinese social media app restored service to users in the U.S. on Sunday, just hours after it went dark in response to a federal ban, which Trump said he would pause by executive order on Monday.

Han also met with Musk and other top U.S. business executives, including representatives of the U.S.-China Business Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C., according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

The Chinese vice president reiterated promises for an improved business environment for foreign firms in China and expressed hopes that U.S. companies will continue expanding investment in the country.

Musk, whose company Tesla operates a factory in Shanghai, posted on his platform X after the meeting that he has long opposed the TikTok ban “because it goes against freedom of speech.”

“That said, the current situation where TikTok is allowed to operate in America, but X is not allowed to operate in China is unbalanced,” he wrote. “Something needs to change.”

X is banned in China alongside other major U.S. social media and news apps and websites, including YouTube, Google, Facebook and many major U.S. media.

Before yesterdayTechnology

How TikTok’s Most Followed U.S. Influencers Reacted to the App Going Dark: ‘I Feel Cut Off From the World’

19 January 2025 at 19:11
TikTok Reinstates Service

When TikTok influencers in the United States opened their apps on the evening of Saturday, Jan. 18, many expected to have their last few hours of scrolling or posting. Instead, they were met with the following message: “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

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What followed was hours of uncertainty and discomfort for many high-profile TikTok users, as they sought to find alternative avenues to connect with their fanbases.

On Sunday afternoon, TikTok announced that it would begin restoring service to U.S. users that already have the app downloaded. The social media platform went on to thank President-elect Trump, who had spoken out on Truth Social hours before, stating that he planned to issue an executive order to save the app upon his return to the White House on Monday.

After the app went dark on Saturday night, TikTok’s biggest U.S. influencers reacted with a mixture of disappointment and resigned humor as they embarked on their first day without the platform. Some influencers rebounded by using other social media options, primarily Instagram.

TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, whose online fame has landed her a role on Broadway’s & Juliet, posted on Instagram reels on Saturday night: “Hey reels, how we doing? We’re here,” she said in the short upload. She later returned to Instagram to post a video of “the first TikTok dance she ever learned.”

Although D’Amelio’s Instagram audience is more than substantial—she currently has 42.8 million followers—her following on TikTok is staggeringly higher, as she boasts 156.8 million followers on the app.

Read More: Here’s What Happened When India Banned TikTok in 2020

Like D’Amelio, other top influencers used alternative social media platforms to post notes of gratitude to their followers and share nostalgic look-backs at their years on TikTok. Jojo Siwa, of Dance Moms and Dancing with the Stars fame, was among many influencers that reacted by posting old videos of themselves. Siwa, who has over 45 million TikTok followers, took to Instagram—where she has 11 million followers—to post a compilation of popular TikTok videos of herself, her caption reading: “Making this made me pretty emotional. Thank you for all the memories made.”

Spencer X—a musician and beatboxer who rose to fame on TikTok and eventually racked up almost 55 million followers on the app—also relocated to Instagram during the ban.

“TikTok forever changed my life. This is so crazy to see…” he wrote on his Instagram story to his 958k Instagram followers.  “You’ll forever be in our hearts. Thank you for everything.” 

YouTuber Larri Merrit, known professionally as “Larray,” posted videos on his Instagram story of him and fellow internet personality-turned-celebrity Quenlin Blackwell crying after TikTok stopped working for them. Larray, who has 27.5 million TikTok followers and around 6.5 million followers on Instagram, wrote that he hopes his followers will “continue to uplift and celebrate [their] favorite creators as they navigate this new chapter,” urging them to follow creators on other platforms.

@alixearle

I truly feel sick to my stomach & I cried myself to sleep last night. I love you all 🫶🏼

♬ it hurts, now that you’re gone – i don’t like mirrors

Meanwhile, Alix Earle— a TikTok and media personality known for her vlog-style content—posted a video of herself teary-eyed and emotional on TikTok before the app went dark on Saturday night. 

“I feel like I’m going through heartbreak,” she wrote for a caption displayed across the video. “This platform is more than an app or a job to me. I have so many memories on here. I have posted every day for the past 6 years of my life. I’ve shared my friends, family, relationships, personal struggles, secrets.”

“I cried myself to sleep last night,” she added.

Other influencers complained they felt “disconnected” and “cut off” from their communities when unable to access the app.

Internet personality James Charles, who got his start as a makeup aficionado on YouTube but now has over 40 million followers on TikTok posted to Instagram when his TikTok stopped working, complaining that it was “dystopian.”

“I don’t know what to do… I’ve already opened and closed the app probably six times already just to keep getting the same stupid warning message,” Charles told his 20 million Instagram followers. “I feel disconnected. I feel cut off from the world and my community…Now I’m rooting for Trump? Ew.”

TikTok went dark after the Supreme Court unanimously decided on Friday that the app’s potential risk to U.S. national security warranted a ban in the United States, outweighing anger from citizens over freedom of speech concerns and its popularity in the country.

Trump, set to be sworn in on Monday, January 20, posted on his Truth Social account on Sunday that he was “asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark.”

“I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security,” he wrote. “The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

TikTok Restores U.S. Service Despite Legal Ban, Citing ‘Trump’s Efforts’

19 January 2025 at 11:05
TikTok is back in USA

TikTok restored service to users in the United States on Sunday just hours after the popular video-sharing platform went dark in response to a federal ban, which President-elect Donald Trump said he would try to pause by executive order on his first day in office.

Trump said he planned to issue the order to give TikTok’s China-based parent company more time to find an approved buyer before the ban takes full effect. He announced the move on his Truth Social account as millions of U.S. TikTok users awoke to discover they could no longer access the TikTok app or platform.

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But by Sunday afternoon, a message greeted those who signed on thanking them—and the president-elect—for their support.

“As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the message read.

TikTok said it shut down the platform late Saturday because of a federal law that required parent company ByteDance to sell its U.S. operation by Sunday. Google and Apple also removed TikTok from their digital stores. The law, which passed with wide bipartisan support in April, allows for steep fines.

While the company that runs TikTok in the U.S. said on X that the steps Trump outlined Sunday provided “the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties,” the TikTok app remained unavailable for download in Apple and Google’s app stores.

“It was a brilliant marketing stunt for both TikTok and incoming president Donald Trump,” Jasmine Enberg, an analyst with market research firm Emarketer, said. “By abruptly shutting off service, TikTok proved how unpopular the ban was among its users.”

Why was TikTok banned? What can Trump do about it?

The law that took effect Sunday required ByteDance to cut ties with the platform’s U.S. operations due to national security concerns. However, the statute authorized the sitting president to grant a 90-day extension if a viable sale was underway.

Although investors made some offers, ByteDance has said it would not sell. Trump said his order would “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect” and “confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how Trump’s promised action would fare from a legal standpoint since the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ban on Friday and the statute came into force the day before Trump’s return to the White House. Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin and the bill’s author, said on Fox News Sunday that “there is no extension” for TikTok.

“Let me tell you, as the person who wrote the bill, the extension was within the 270-day window, which closed at 12:01 a.m. this morning,” he said, adding that only if the president certifies there are “legally binding documents” showing a divestiture is on the way would there be an extension.

“I think Trump can at least make an argument that the language is meant to cover any president,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said.

Some lawmakers who voted for the sale-or-ban law, including some of Trump’s fellow Republicans, remain in favor of it. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas warned companies Sunday not to provide TikTok with technical support.

“Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law,” Cotton wrote on X. “Think about it.”

Constitutional and business law attorney Kirk McGill said he thinks Trump lacks the legal authority to suspend the ban but it’s unlikely the question would reach a court in the time it might take TikTok to find a buyer.

It’s also unlikely that Apple or Google will face legal consequences if they move forward with Trump’s demands, given that his administration would have to initiate any prosecutions, McGill said.

“In the next week or two, before the courts have the chance to do anything, this is certainly going to be a political fight, not a legal one,” McGill said.

TikTok shuts off—but only temporarily?

The on-and-off availability of TikTok came after the Supreme Court ruled that the risk to national security posed by TikTok’s ties to China outweighed concerns about limiting speech by the app or its millions of U.S. users.

When TikTok users in the U.S. tried to watch or post videos on the platform as of Saturday night, they saw a pop-up message under the headline, “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now.”

“A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S.,” the message said. “Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

The app was removed late Saturday from prominent app stores and remained so as of Sunday afternoon. Apple told customers it also took down other apps developed by ByteDance. They included Lemon8, which some influencers had promoted as a TikTok alternative, the popular video editing app CapCut and photo editor Hypic.

“Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates,” the company said.

Google declined to comment. Apple did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the day’s developments.

Experts had said the law as written did not require TikTok to take down its platform, only for app stores to remove it. Current users expected to continue to have access to videos until a lack of updates caused the app to stop working.

After TikTok was back online Sunday, content creator Tiffany Watson, 20, said she was “pretty hopeful” it would stay up. At the same time, Watson said her dedication “solely” to the platform declined during the months the threat of a ban loomed.

“Overall, I hope that creators will succeed and find community in spite of the unpredictability of TikTok,” she said.

Will the ban’s timing help TikTok?

Trump’s plan to spare TikTok on his first day in office reflected the ban’s coincidental timing and the unusual mix of political considerations surrounding a social media platform that first gained popularity with often silly videos featuring dances and music clips.

During his first presidential term, Trump in 2020 issued executive orders banning dealings with ByteDance and the owners of the Chinese messaging app WeChat, moves that courts subsequently blocked.

Trump has since credited TikTok with helping him win support from young voters in last year’s presidential election. TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration with a prime seating location.

Trump’s choice for national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told CBS News on Sunday that the president-elect discussed TikTok during a weekend call with Chinese President Xi Jinping “and they agreed to work together on this.”

The Biden administration has also stressed in recent days that it did not intend to implement or enforce the ban before Trump takes office on Monday.

Who are possible buyers of TikTok?

ByteDance has publicly insisted it would not sell TikTok, and no likely buyer has emerged.

On Saturday, artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI submitted a proposal to ByteDance to create a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Perplexity is not asking to purchase the ByteDance algorithm that feeds TikTok user’s videos based on their interests.

In Washington, lawmakers and administration officials have long warned that the algorithm is vulnerable to manipulation by China. To date, the U.S. has not publicly provided evidence of TikTok providing user data to Chinese authorities or tinkering with the algorithm to benefit Chinese interests.

Another unknown is whether Trump will remain a TikTok fan.

“He’s flip-flopped on his stance toward TikTok before, and there’s no guarantee he won’t do so again,” EMarketer’s Enberg said.

—Kanis Leung in Hong Kong and Charlotte Kramon in Atlanta, Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas, and Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, contributed to this story.

Trump Says He Will ‘Most Likely’ Give TikTok a 90-Day Extension to Avoid U.S. Ban

18 January 2025 at 18:59
Donald Trump

President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that he “most likely” would give TikTok 90 more days to work out a deal that would allow the popular video-sharing platform to avoid a U.S. ban.

Trump said in an NBC News interview that he had not decided what to do but was considering granting TikTok a reprieve after he is sworn into office on Monday. A law that prohibits mobile app stores and internet hosting services from distributing TikTok to U.S. users takes effect on Sunday.

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Under the law passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden last year, TikTok’s China-based parent company had nine months to sell the platform’s U.S. operation to an approved buyer. The law allows the sitting president to grant an extension if a sale is in progress.

“I think that would be, certainly, an option that we look at. The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate. You know, it’s appropriate,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone interview. “We have to look at it carefully. It’s a very big situation.

“If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday,” he said.

Both White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made clear Friday that the Biden administration would leave the law’s implementation to Trump given that his inauguration falls the day after the ban takes effect.

In a statement later Friday, TikTok asked for “a definitive statement” saying the Biden administration would not enforce the law or try to fine app store operators like Apple and Google and other U.S. companies if they don’t stop making TikTok available Sunday.

Without those assurances, TikTok said it “will be forced to go dark.” But the company did not provide details, including whether it would voluntarily shut down its U.S. platform at midnight or suspend its operations after losing access to service providers it relies on.

The White House on Saturday called TikTok’s statement “a stunt.”

“We see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump administration takes office on Monday,” Jean-Pierre said. “We have laid out our position clearly and straightforwardly: actions to implement this law will fall to the next administration. So TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them.”

Neither Apple, Google or Oracle, which hosts TikTok’s data on its servers, have responded to questions about what they plan to do on Sunday.

Here’s What Happened When India Banned TikTok in 2020

18 January 2025 at 17:24
TikTok India

When Congress passed a bill in April 2024 ordering ByteDance to either sell TikTok or face a ban, many speculated that ByteDance would opt to sell, because the American market was too valuable to relinquish freely. But TikTok actually faced an even bigger exodus of users in 2020, when India banned the app.

At the time, India was TikTok’s biggest foreign market outside of China, with 200 million users. (For comparison, the U.S. currently has over 170 million TikTok users.) Following military clashes along the disputed border between India and China, the Indian government banned TikTok along with over 50 other Chinese apps, citing national security concerns.

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Despite the ban, TikTok did just fine in expanding around the world, while national and international tech companies rushed to fill the Indian void, in the process transforming their global approaches to social media. At the same time, digital rights activists tell TIME that the Indian government used the ban as precedent to crack down upon other digital platforms they deemed to be a threat. The way that users, tech giants, the government, and TikTok all adapted to the ban offer clues about what could unfold in the U.S. in the coming months.

Read More: How TikTok’s Most Followed U.S. Influencers Reacted to the App Going Dark: ‘I Feel Cut Off From the World’

Post-ban opportunity

Indian users flocked to TikTok as early as 2017. Video was already a dominant format in the country, buoyed by massive 4G and 5G infrastructure projects that allowed people with smartphones in remote villages to stream content. TikTok took that ecosystem even farther, allowing India’s millions of regional dialect speakers to share content and create digital communities. (At the same time, caste-based hate speech grew rapidly on the platform.) 

“A lot of the people in the rural part of the country were okay with just being themselves, and creating a 15-second clip of some song they liked,” says Murli Kanne, an entrepreneur based in Hyderabad, India, who was working in influencer marketing at the time. “People started getting followers really easily. Hindi was mostly the language used in the viral TikToks, but a lot of regional content popped up as well.” 

When the Indian government banned TikTok in June 2020, some influencers striving for global fame started using VPNs to post on TikTok. But for the millions and millions of smaller-scale users, local companies rushed to meet their demand, including MX TakaTak, Chingari, and Moj—which was launched in July 2020 by the Indian social media powerhouse ShareChat, registered over one million downloads within a week. In November 2020, at least 13 of the top 100 social apps in the Google Play Store in India were TikTok clones, with most of them newly launched, Rest of World reported. Many of these apps offered money to influencers to post on their platforms. The Indian government encouraged these efforts by issuing an Innovation Challenge to build local versions of banned apps. 

Read More: Will You Still Be Able to Use TikTok If It’s Banned? Here’s What You Need to Know

Big Tech takes over

But as these local apps fought for market share, they were about to fall behind much larger and more-resourced American competitors. “A few of these apps were not up to the mark when we compare tech,” Kanne says. “I don’t think they had a chance with the giants against them.” 

YouTube was already a hugely popular platform in India. Within months of the TikTok ban, its parent company Alphabet launched a beta version of YouTube Shorts in the country. And because audiences were already on the platform, many Indian content creators found instant success with Shorts. Comedy creator Dushyant Kukreja found that his Shorts received similar levels of views as his TikTok videos, and he soon grew his YouTube following from 40,000 to over 6 million. Creator Manjusha Martin, who had built a TikTok audience of over 770,000, created a web series on Shorts, surpassing 2 million followers on that platform. 

Buoyed by this success, YouTube soon expanded Shorts to dozens more countries. By the summer of 2022, they reported 1.5 billion viewers every month, rivaling TikTok’s viewership. 

Instagram, not to be outdone, pushed out its Reels feature in August 2020, and made India the first country to have a version of the app with Reels in a separate tab. Indians tuned into watch music and cricket, with over 1 million reels created related to the 2022 ICC T20 World Cup. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Reels made up more than 20% of the time people spent on Instagram, making it the company’s “fastest-growing content format by far.”

Ultimately, most of the Indian-based TikTok alternatives folded, and Indian audiences and creators got used to Shorts and Reels. The scrappy and broadly rural culture of TikTok in India winnowed down into a more top-down influencer culture on those two platforms. India is now the biggest market for both YouTube (almost 500 million monthly users) and Instagram (362 million). 

Global competition and privacy concerns

Although the Indian userbase was a significant loss for TikTok, the company simply expanded across the world. Research shows that TikTok’s userbase essentially doubled between 2020 and 2024. And the U.S. wasn’t even the main driver of this uptick: Indonesia has the most TikTok users in the world. (Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam also have sizable audiences.) TikTok’s current dominance across continents, and its proven ability to rebound from previous massive bans, mean that ByteDance is likely in no hurry to sell the app. Rather, it will likely simply continue its expansion abroad, and hope that America’s political situation changes. 

Meta and YouTube, meanwhile, have a huge opportunity to grow, just like they did in India in 2020. And this time, they have a huge headstart, because Reels and Shorts are already a key part of American social media. 

However, many Americans have expressed the desire for new platforms—as evidenced by the flood of TikTokers to the Chinese app Red Note over the past week. “Unless you pay Meta to promote your posts, they’re not really going to show it to people,” Christina Shuler, a South Carolina-based entrepreneur who recently signed up for Red Note, tells TIME. “And Facebook is just a bunch of angry people on there. So it was refreshing to get on Red Note and know that my content was appreciated.” 

As users search for a new landing spot, digital rights activists view these TikTok bans from a more ominous perspective. Raman Jit Singh Chima, the Asia-Pacific policy director at Access Now, says that India’s TikTok ban led to an increase in the government censorship of digital content. Over the last couple months, VPN apps have been disappearing from the country’s app stores, seemingly for not complying with local rules. “The ban has built a precedent that has allowed the Indian government to continue blocking access to more web and social media content, including very often content posted by journalists or critics of the Administration,” Chima claims.

U.S.-based activists worry that the same thing could happen following the U.S. ban, especially given that the Supreme Court upheld it, giving the green light for Congress to put pressure on other social media apps they deem dangerous going forward. Other countries may follow suit and issue their own bans, as well. “

We are disappointed to see the Court sweep past the undisputed content-based justification for the law—to control what speech Americans see and share with each other—and rule only based on the shaky data privacy concerns,” David Greene, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a statement emailed to TIME.

Everything Trump Has Said About the TikTok Ban 

17 January 2025 at 21:24
FRANCE-SOCIETE-ILLUSTRATION-SMARTPHONE-INTERDICTION-TIKTOK-SOCIA

The fate of Tiktok is now in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump after the Supreme Court upheld the ban on the viral video app Friday. The Biden Administration announced it would not enforce the ban, which was set to go into effect on Sunday, Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. 

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“The Supreme Court decision was expected, and everyone must respect it,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Friday. “My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation.”

Trump previously asked the Supreme Court to pause the ban from going into effect so his Administration could look for a “political resolution.” But the President-elect’s current position on TikTok is a reverse from his 2020 stance, when Trump sought to ban TikTok. A federal judge blocked the act in December 2020. “You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points and there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with it,” Trump said in a post-election news conference in December.

The U.S. first began investigating TikTok in 2019, two years after the Chinese company ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, which was then merged into TikTok.

The ban comes after President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan law last April forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to divest from the app or be banned in the U.S. citing national security concerns given the app’s connections to China. During Supreme Court arguments, Department of Justice Solicitor General Elizaveth Prelogar claimed China could harvest the data of U.S. users which could then be used to harass, rescruit, and spy on the United States. ByteDance has said that it will not sell TikTok and claimed that the law infringes on the First Amendment rights of the company and the 170 million American users.

“There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” the court said in its decision. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”

In a statement Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that given the timing of the ban, “actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday.” 

Earlier on Friday, Trump announced that he had spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the two talked about TikTok, along with other topics. “President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe,” he said. 

Negotiations regarding the future of the social media platform appear to be in motion. In December, Trump met with TikTok CEO Shou Chew. While the Supreme Court result did not fall in favor with the desires of TikTok executives, Chew still thanked Trump for his “commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States,” in a video posted after the Supreme Court decision Friday, in which he shared that there had been more than 60 billion views of Trump’s content on the app. Chew also shared that the company was still working hard to ensure the app would still be available to its users in the U.S.

“TikTok itself is a fantastic platform,” Mike Waltz, Trump’s pick for a national security adviser,  told Fox News Special Report with Bret Baier on Wednesday. “We’re going to find a way to preserve it but protect people’s data.”

Supreme Court Upholds Law Banning TikTok

17 January 2025 at 16:26
Supreme Court TikTok

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld the federal law banning TikTok beginning Sunday unless it’s sold by its China-based parent company, holding that the risk to national security posed by its ties to China overcomes concerns about limiting speech by the app or its 170 million users in the United States.

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A sale does not appear imminent and, although experts have said the app will not disappear from existing users’ phones once the law takes effect on Jan. 19, new users won’t be able to download it and updates won’t be available. That will eventually render the app unworkable, the Justice Department has said in court filings.

The decision came against the backdrop of unusual political agitation by President-elect Donald Trump, who vowed that he could negotiate a solution and the administration of President Joe Biden, which has signaled it won’t enforce the law beginning Sunday, his final full day in office.

Trump, mindful of TikTok’s popularity, and his own 14.7 million followers on the app, finds himself on the opposite side of the argument from prominent Senate Republicans who fault TikTok’s Chinese owner for not finding a buyer before now. Trump said in a Truth Social post shortly before the decision was issued that TikTok was among the topics in his conversation Friday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

It’s unclear what options are open to Trump once he is sworn in as president on Monday. The law allowed for a 90-day pause in the restrictions on the app if there had been progress toward a sale before it took effect. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who defended the law at the Supreme Court for the Democratic Biden administration, told the justices last week that it’s uncertain whether the prospect of a sale once the law is in effect could trigger a 90-day respite for TikTok.

“Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary,” the court said in an unsigned opinion, adding that the law “does not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch filed short separate opinions noting some reservations about the court’s decision but going along with the outcome.

“Without doubt, the remedy Congress and the President chose here is dramatic,” Gorsuch wrote. Still, he said he was persuaded by the argument that China could get access to “vast troves of personal information about tens of millions of Americans.”

Some digital rights groups slammed the court’s ruling shortly after it was released.

“Today’s unprecedented decision upholding the TikTok ban harms the free expression of hundreds of millions of TikTok users in this country and around the world,” said Kate Ruane, a director at the Washington-based Center for Democracy & Technology, which has supported TikTok’s challenge to the federal law.

Content creators who opposed the law also worried about the effect on their business if TikTok shuts down. “I’m very, very concerned about what’s going to happen over the next couple weeks,” said Desiree Hill, owner of Crown’s Corner mechanic shop in Conyers, Georgia. “And very scared about the decrease that I’m going to have in reaching customers and worried I’m going to potentially lose my business in the next six months.”

At arguments, the justices were told by a lawyer for TikTok and ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese technology company that is its parent, how difficult it would be to consummate a deal, especially since Chinese law restricts the sale of the proprietary algorithm that has made the social media platform wildly successful.

The app allows users to watch hundreds of videos in about half an hour because some are only a few seconds long, according to a lawsuit filed last year by Kentucky complaining that TikTok is designed to be addictive and harms kids’ mental health. Similar suits were filed by more than a dozen states. TikTok has called the claims inaccurate.

The dispute over TikTok’s ties to China has come to embody the geopolitical competition between Washington and Beijing.

“ByteDance and its Chinese Communist masters had nine months to sell TikTok before the Sunday deadline,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote on X. “The very fact that Communist China refuses to permit its sale reveals exactly what TikTok is: a communist spy app. The Supreme Court correctly rejected TikTok’s lies and propaganda masquerading as legal arguments.”

The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.

TikTok points out the U.S. has not presented evidence that China has attempted to manipulate content on its U.S. platform or gather American user data through TikTok.

Bipartisan majorities in Congress passed legislation and Biden signed it into law in April. The law was the culmination of a yearslong saga in Washington over TikTok, which the government sees as a national security threat.

TikTok, which sued the government last year over the law, has long denied it could be used as a tool of Beijing. A three-judge panel made up of two Republican appointees and a Democratic appointee unanimously upheld the law in December, prompting TikTok’s quick appeal to the Supreme Court.

Without a sale to an approved buyer, the law bars app stores operated by Apple, Google and others from offering TikTok beginning on Sunday. Internet hosting services also will be prohibited from hosting TikTok.

ByteDance has said it won’t sell. But some investors have been eyeing it, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire businessman Frank McCourt. McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative has said it and its unnamed partners have presented a proposal to ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. assets. The consortium, which includes “Shark Tank” host Kevin O’Leary, did not disclose the financial terms of the offer.

McCourt, in a statement following the ruling, said his group was “ready to work with the company and President Trump to complete a deal.”

Prelogar told the justices last week that having the law take effect “might be just the jolt” ByteDance needs to reconsider its position.

___

Associated Press writers Haleluya Hadero, Mae Anderson and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report. Hadero reported from South Bend, Indiana, and Anderson from New York.

5 Predictions for AI in 2025

16 January 2025 at 12:07

If 2023 was the year of AI fervor, following the late-2022 release of ChatGPT, 2024 was marked by a steady drumbeat of advances as systems got smarter, faster, and cheaper to run. AI also began to reason more deeply and interact via voice and video—trends that AI experts and leaders say will accelerate. Here’s what to expect from AI in 2025.

More and better AI agents

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In 2025, we’ll begin to see a shift from chatbots and image generators toward “agentic” systems that can act autonomously to complete tasks, rather than simply answer questions, says AI futurist Ray Kurzweil. In October, Anthropic gave its AI model Claude the ability to use computers—clicking, scrolling, and typing—but this may be just the start. Agents will be able to handle complex tasks like scheduling appointments and writing software, experts say. “These systems are going to get more and more sophisticated,” says Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s VP of generative AI. Jaime Sevilla, director of AI forecasting nonprofit Epoch AI, envisions a future where AI agents function as virtual co-workers, but says that in 2025 AI agents will be mostly about their novelty. Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that agents’ mistakes could have “big consequences,” particularly if they have access to personal or financial information.

Read More: How the Rise of New Digital Workers Will Lead to an Unlimited Age

A national-security priority

Governments will increasingly view AI through the lens of national security, says Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety: “It’s how many of the big decisions about AI will be made.” The U.S. has curbed China’s access to critical chips, while Meta and Anthropic have forged closer ties with U.S. intelligence agencies by allowing them to use their AI models. “Political developments around the world are pointing us in the direction of continued competition,” says the U.N. Secretary-General’s envoy on technology, Amandeep Singh Gill, emphasizing the need to preserve “pockets of collaboration” between the U.S. and China.

Read More: How the Benefits—and Harms—of AI Grew in 2024

Governance races to catch up

While developers compete to build ever-smarter systems, governments around the world are racing to regulate them. The E.U. leads with its AI Act. Its Code of Practice, set to be finalized by April and enforced from August, is one of the first laws targeting frontier AI developers, and many of the E.U. requirements will likely have global impact on how companies operate, unless they opt to take distinct approaches in different markets, says Markus Anderljung at the Centre for the Governance of AI. In the U.S., where more than 100 bills have been brought to Congress, Anderljung predicts “very little will happen” federally this year, though states may act independently.

Facing the investment test

The year ahead “will be a year of reckoning,” Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of Humane Intelligence, tells TIME in an email. “With billions invested, companies now have to show consumer value.” In health care, that value seems clear—for example, additional AI diagnostic tools are expected to gain FDA approval, and AI may also prove useful in discovering and monitoring the long-term impact of various drugs. But elsewhere, the pressure to demonstrate returns may create problems. “Because of the pressure to make money back from all these investments, there might be some imposition of flawed models on the Global South,” says Jai Vipra, an AI policy researcher, noting these markets face less scrutiny than Western ones. In India, she points to trends in automating already exploitative jobs like call-center work as a source of concern.

AI video goes mainstream

In December, Google and OpenAI released impressive video models. OpenAI’s Sora launch was plagued by access delay, while Google’s Veo 2 was released to select users. Sevilla expects video-generation tools to become more widely accessible as developers find ways to make them cheaper to run. Meta’s Al-Dahle predicts video will also become a key input for AI, envisioning a not-too-distant future in which systems analyze video from smart glasses to offer real-time assistance across various tasks, like fixing a bike.

Inside the U.K.’s Bold Experiment in AI Safety

16 January 2025 at 12:03

In May 2023, three of the most important CEOs in artificial intelligence walked through the iconic black front door of No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the U.K. Prime Minister, in London. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic were there to discuss AI, following the blockbuster release of ChatGPT six months earlier.

After posing for a photo opportunity with then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in his private office, the men filed through into the cabinet room next door and took seats at its long, rectangular table. Sunak and U.K. government officials lined up on one side; the three CEOs and some of their advisers sat facing them. After a polite discussion about how AI could bring opportunities for the U.K. economy, Sunak surprised the visitors by saying he wanted to talk about the risks. The Prime Minister wanted to know more about why the CEOs had signed what he saw as a worrying declaration arguing that AI was as risky as pandemics or nuclear war, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. He invited them to attend the world’s first AI Safety Summit, which the U.K. was planning to host that November. And he managed to get each to agree to grant his government prerelease access to their companies’ latest AI models, so that a task force of British officials, established a month earlier and modeled on the country’s COVID-19 vaccine unit, could test them for dangers.

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Read More: Inside the U.K.’s AI Safety Summit

The U.K. was the first country in the world to reach this kind of agreement with the so-called frontier AI labs —the few groups responsible for the world’s most capable models. Six months later, Sunak formalized his task force as an official body called the AI Safety Institute (AISI), which in the year since has become the most advanced program inside any government for evaluating the risks of AI. With £100 million ($127 million) in public funding, the body has around 10 times the budget of the U.S. government’s own AI Safety Institute, which was established at the same time.

Inside the new U.K. AISI, teams of AI researchers and national-security officials began conducting tests to check whether new AIs were capable of facilitating biological, chemical, or cyberattacks, or escaping the control of their creators. Until then, such safety testing had been possible only inside the very AI companies that also had a market incentive to forge ahead regardless of what the tests found. In setting up the institute, government insiders argued that it was crucial for democratic nations to have the technical capabilities to audit and understand cutting-edge AI systems, if they wanted to have any hope of influencing pivotal decisions about the technology in the future. “You really want a public-interest body that is genuinely representing people to be making those decisions,” says Jade Leung, the AISI’s chief technology officer. “There aren’t really legitimate sources of those [decisions], aside from governments.”

In a remarkably short time, the AISI has won the respect of the AI industry by managing to carry out world-class AI safety testing within a government. It has poached big-name researchers from OpenAI and Google DeepMind. So far, they and their colleagues have tested 16 models, including at least three frontier models ahead of their public launches. One of them, which has not previously been reported, was Google’s Gemini Ultra model, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. This prerelease test found no significant previously unknown risks, two of those people said. The institute also tested OpenAI’s o1 model and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model ahead of their releases, both companies said in documentation accompanying each launch. In May, the AISI launched an open-source tool for testing the capabilities of AI systems, which has become popular among businesses and other governments attempting to assess AI risks.

But despite these accolades, the AISI has not yet proved whether it can leverage its testing to actually make AI systems safer. It often does not publicly disclose the results of its evaluations, nor information about whether AI companies have acted upon what it has found, for what it says are security and intellectual-property reasons. The U.K., where it is housed, has an AI economy that was worth £5.8 billion ($7.3 billion) in 2023, but the government has minimal jurisdiction over the world’s most powerful AI companies. (While Google DeepMind is headquartered in London, it remains a part of the U.S.-based tech giant.) The British government, now controlled by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, is incentivized not to antagonize the heads of these companies too much, because they have the power to grow or withdraw a local industry that leaders hope will become an even bigger contributor to the U.K.’s struggling economy. So a key question remains: Can the fledgling AI Safety Institute really hold billion-dollar tech giants accountable?

AI Safety Summit - Day Two

In the U.S., the extraordinary wealth and power of tech has deflected meaningful regulation. The U.K. AISI’s lesser-funded U.S. counterpart, housed in moldy offices in Maryland and Colorado, does not size up to be an exception. But that might soon change. In August, the U.S. AISI signed agreements to gain predeployment access to AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. And in October, the Biden Administration released a sweeping national-security memorandum tasking the U.S. AISI with safety-testing new frontier models and collaborating with the NSA on classified evaluations.

While the U.K. and U.S. AISIs are currently partners, and have already carried out joint evaluations of AI models, the U.S. institute may be better positioned to take the lead by securing unilateral access to the world’s most powerful AI models should it come to that. But Donald Trump’s electoral victory has made the future of the U.S. AISI uncertain. Many Republicans are hostile to government regulation—and especially to bodies like the federally funded U.S. AISI that may be seen as placing obstacles in front of economic growth. Billionaire Elon Musk, who helped bankroll Trump’s re-election, and who has his own AI company called xAI, is set to co-lead a body tasked with slashing federal spending. Yet Musk himself has long expressed concern about the risks from advanced AI, and many rank-and-file Republicans are supportive of more national-security-focused AI regulations. Amid this uncertainty, the unique selling point of the U.K. AISI might simply be its stability—a place where researchers can make progress on AI safety away from the conflicts of interest they’d face in industry, and away from the political uncertainty of a Trumpian Washington.

On a warm June morning about three weeks after the big meeting at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Sunak stepped up to a lectern at a tech conference in London to give a keynote address. “The very pioneers of AI are warning us about the ways these technologies could undermine our values and freedoms, through to the most extreme risks of all,” he told the crowd. “And that’s why leading on AI also means leading on AI safety.” Explaining to the gathered tech industry that his was a government that “gets it,” he announced the deal that he had struck weeks earlier with the CEOs of the leading labs. “I’m pleased to announce they’ve committed to give early or priority access to models for research and safety purposes,” he said.

Behind the scenes, a small team inside Downing Street was still trying to work out exactly what that agreement meant. The wording itself had been negotiated with the labs, but the technical details had not, and “early or priority access” was a vague commitment. Would the U.K. be able to obtain the so-called weights—essentially the underlying neural network—of these cutting-edge AI models, which would allow a deeper form of interrogation than simply chatting with the model via text? Would the models be transferred to government hardware that was secure enough to test for their knowledge of classified information, like nuclear secrets or details of dangerous bioweapons? Or would this “access” simply be a link to a model hosted on private computers, thus allowing the maker of the model to snoop on the government’s evaluations? Nobody yet knew the answers to these questions.

In the weeks after the announcement, the relationship between the U.K. and the AI labs grew strained. In negotiations, the government had asked for full-blown access to model weights—a total handover of their most valuable intellectual property that the labs saw as a complete nonstarter. Giving one government access to model weights would open the door to doing the same for many others—democratic or not. For companies that had spent millions of dollars on hardening their own cybersecurity to prevent their models’ being exfiltrated by hostile actors, it was a hard sell. It quickly became clear that the type of testing the U.K. government wanted to do would be possible via a chat interface, so the U.K. government dropped its request for model weights, and officials privately conceded that it was a mistake to ever ask. The experience was an early lesson in where the real power lay between the British government and the tech companies. It was far more important to keep the labs friendly and collaborative, officials believed, than to antagonize them and risk torpedoing the access to models upon which the AISI relied to do its job.

Still, the question of snooping remained. If they were going to carry out their safety tests by connecting to computers owned by AI companies, then the U.K. wanted assurances that employees of those companies couldn’t watch its evaluations. Doing so might allow the companies to manipulate their models so that they concealed unsafe behaviors in ways that would pass the tests, some researchers worried. So they and the labs settled on a compromise. The labs would not keep logs of the tests being done on their servers by the AISI, nor would they require individual testers to identify themselves. For their part, safety testers inside the AISI would not input classified information into the models, and instead would use workarounds that still allowed them to test whether, for example, a model had the capability to advise a user on how to create a bioweapon or computer virus. “Instead of asking about a dangerous virus, you can ask about some harmless virus,” says Geoffrey Irving, the AISI’s chief scientist. “And if a model can do advanced experimental design or give detailed advice for the non-dangerous virus, it can do the same thing for the dangerous virus.” It was these kinds of tests that AISI workers applied to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, OpenAI’s o1, and Gemini Ultra, the models that they tested ahead of release.

And yet despite all these tests, the AISI does not—cannot—certify that these models are safe. It can only identify dangers. “The science of evaluations is not strong enough that we can confidently rule out all risks from doing these evaluations,” says Irving. “To have more confidence those behaviors are not there, you need a lot more resources devoted to it. And I think some of those experiments, at least with the current level of access, can only be conducted at the labs.” The AISI does not currently have the infrastructure, the right expertise, or indeed the model access that would be required to scrutinize the weights of frontier models for dangers. That science is a nascent field, mostly practiced behind closed doors at the major AI companies. But Irving doesn’t rule out asking for model weights again if the AISI spins up a team capable of doing similar work. “We will ask again, more intensely, if we need that access in the future,” he says.

On a typical day, AISI researchers test models not only for dangers but also for specific types of capability that might become dangerous in the future. The tests aren’t limited to assessing chemical, biological, and cyber-risks. They also include measuring the ability of AI systems to act autonomously as “agents,” carrying out strings of actions; the ease of “jailbreaking” an AI, or removing its safety features that prevent it from saying or doing things its creators did not intend; and the ability of an AI to manipulate users, by changing their beliefs or inducing them to act in certain ways. Recent joint tests by the U.K. and U.S. AISIs on a version of Claude found that the model was better than any other they had tested at software engineering tasks that might help to accelerate AI research. They also found that safeguards built into the model could be “routinely circumvented” via jailbreaking. “These evaluations give governments an insight into the risks developing at the frontier of AI, and an empirical basis to decide if, when, and how to intervene,” Leung and Oliver Illott, the AISI’s director, wrote in a blog post in November. The institute is now working on putting together a set of “capability thresholds” that would be indicative of severe risks, which could serve as triggers for more strenuous government regulations to kick in.

Whether the government will decide to intervene is another question altogether. Sunak, the AISI’s chief political cheerleader, was defeated in a landslide general election in the summer of 2024. His Conservative Party, which for all its hand-wringing about AI safety had advocated only light-touch AI regulation, was replaced by a Labour government that has signaled a greater willingness to legislate on AI. Labour promised ahead of the election to enact “binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models,” though these regulations are yet to appear in Parliament. New laws could also formally require AI labs to share information with the U.K. government, replacing the voluntary agreements that currently exist. This might help turn the AISI into a body with more teeth, by reducing its need to keep the AI companies on friendly terms. “We want to preserve our relationships with labs,” Irving tells TIME of the current system. “It is hard to avoid that kind of relationship if you’re in a purely voluntary regime.”

Without any legal ability to compel labs to act, the AISI could be seen—from one angle—as a taxpayer-funded helper to several multibillion-dollar companies that are unilaterally releasing potentially dangerous AIs into the world. But for AISI insiders, the calculus is very different. They believe that building AI capacity inside a state—and nurturing a network of sister AISIs around the globe—is essential if governments want to have any say in the future of what could be the most transformative technology in human history. “Work on AI safety is a global public good,” says Ian Hogarth, the chair of the institute. “Fundamentally this is a global challenge, and it’s not going to work for any company or country to try to go it alone.”

The Lure of Chinese App Red Note

16 January 2025 at 11:44
Upcoming U.S. TikTok Ban Drives Users To Another Chinese Social Media App

During a recent layover in Tokyo from China to the U.S., as I was planning the ramen spot I was going to hit and friends I wanted to catch up with, I was stopped by a middle-aged border agent. “This is Japan, you need a visa,” he said sternly. 

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I knew I didn’t need one according to official rules, but I didn’t speak Japanese to argue with him. As I turned back, thinking that I had to live like Tom Hanks in The Terminal before my next flight, I searched on Red Note. Thanks to multiple posts by people who had been in the exact same situation, I learned that I had to go to a specific counter by the corner and ask for a “shore pass.” I was able to enter Japan for 72 hours instead of sleeping on a bench in my 30s. 

That’s the kind of obscure situation Red Note has saved people out of. Since last weekend, the “TikTok refugees”—the American social media users who are flocking to Red Note ahead of the U.S. ban on Sunday—are being welcomed with Chinese memes, photos of food, pets, street views, and Taylor Swift lyrics. English-language tutorials are helping them navigate the Chinese app.

Although Red Note may now be known as the no.1 free app in the U.S., it has since its inception in 2013 been known as a forum that caters to middle-class Chinese users’ niche interests and hobbies—a lifestyle guide on dining and travel, and a search engine for questions big and small.

Yet the ongoing digital migration—helped by the #TikTokrefugee hashtag that has amassed 872 million views and 16 million discussions so far—will likely be a unique and short-lived phase. And either Beijing, Washington, or Red Note itself needs to find a solution fast.

Read More: Will You Still Be Able to Use TikTok If It’s Banned?

From a business perspective, Red Note has achieved something TikTok owner ByteDance has been dreaming of for years—winning overseas users without trying too hard. In 2020, ByteDance launched a knockoff version, Lemon8, and has paid users to post on it. Yet the app has struggled to retain users. It has recently benefited from the TikTok migration, now ranking at no. 2 on the U.S. app store, but almost all the buzz surrounds Red Note.

Why aren’t more users turning instead to Weibo, Bilibili, Kwai, or indeed, the real Chinese TikTok Douyin?

Red Note was initially prototyped in October 2013 by Stanford University graduate Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang as a shopping guide for female consumers. It has now evolved into a lifestyle guru for around 300 million people.

The app has a highly educated audience, which includes a large diasporic population who speak fluent English. Because of their shared socio-economic background, the platform’s users are keen to provide value and feedback to each other, like how I found help at the airport.

It is also the most apolitical social platform in China. On Nov. 16, 2023, the day of Xi Jinping’s first visit to the U.S. in years, I analyzed the trending lists on Chinese social media. While lists on other apps were peppered with items like “China will be unified and must be unified” (Weibo) and “Biden shows a 38-year-old photo to Xi Jinping” (Douyin), Red Note’s users were concerned about “the boundary of two married people” and “white people food.”

It’s not difficult to imagine that even if U.S. users tried other Chinese platforms, they may encounter more nationalism, hostility, or, at best, indifference. 

For now, the posts I come across on Red Note are mostly about food, pets, and ordinary people. But what happens if political activists decide to use the platform to amplify their voices? And more likely, what happens if American users, who are used to free speech, want to verify the news they’ve been hearing about China, on Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, or labor rights?

The hodgepodge of Western and Chinese users within the “Great Firewall” has created unprecedented regulatory problems that have never been dealt with by either China or the U.S. Before Red Note became a thing for Americans, China could simply block an app that’s operating on its soil. But what about now?

As of Wednesday, a Weibo trending item may have spelled out the solution: “Red Note is urgently recruiting English content moderators [Chinese].”

China’s censorship has intensified since Xi took office in 2012, with stricter measures like enhanced online real-name verification and the silencing of high-profile voices including economists, law firms, and even stock analysts.

Red Note’s relatively non-political user base has helped protect it. But in recent years it has increasingly featured emotional stories about economic struggles, published content banned by state media, and played host to posts that criticized Chinese officials and the government. The recent flood of American users to Red Note may push Beijing to pay more attention to the app.

Indeed, China’s censorship has routinely evolved with the times. While in middle school in the early 2000s, I sent out five postcards to Ohio as part of a cultural exchange program and only received one back. Part of me always wondered if my government seized them. In 2008, I was excited to follow American Idol contestants on Facebook. But that faded a year later when Beijing blocked the platform. And in 2021, I was almost sleepless when Clubhouse was live in mainland China, when many Chinese users were discussing political issues freely. That freedom lasted a mere two weeks.

While the U.S. TikTok ban and censorship in China are inescapable facts, people always find a way to connect—if not for on TikTok or Red Note, then somewhere else.

Will Trump Save TikTok? Adviser Says President-Elect Is Exploring Options

16 January 2025 at 11:04
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a news conference at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. on Dec. 16, 2024.

Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, said in an interview on Wednesday that the president-elect is exploring options to “preserve” TikTok.

Waltz made the comment when Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked him about a report from The Washington Post that said Trump was considering an executive order to suspend enforcement of a federal law that could ban the popular platform nationwide by Sunday.

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Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a legal challenge to the statute brought by TikTok, its China-based parent company ByteDance, and users of the app. The Justices seemed likely to uphold the law, which requires ByteDance to divest TikTok on national security grounds or face a ban in one of its biggest markets.

Read More: Will You Still Be Able to Use TikTok If It’s Banned? Here’s What You Need to Know

“If the Supreme Court comes out with a ruling in favor of the law, President Trump has been very clear: Number one, TikTok is a great platform that many Americans use and has been great for his campaign and getting his message out. But number two, he’s going to protect their data,” Waltz said.

“He’s a deal maker. I don’t want to get ahead of our executive orders, but we’re going to create this space to put that deal in place,” he added.

Separately on Wednesday, Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, dodged a question during a Senate hearing on whether she’d uphold a TikTok ban.

Trump has reversed his position on the popular app, having tried to ban it during his first term in office over national security concerns. He joined TikTok during his 2024 presidential campaign and his team used it to connect with younger voters, especially male voters, by pushing content that was often macho and aimed at going viral. He pledged to “save TikTok” during the campaign and has credited the platform with helping him win more youth votes.

Will You Still Be Able to Use TikTok If It’s Banned? Here’s What You Need to Know

15 January 2025 at 22:23
TikTok Supreme Court

The TikTok ban is swiftly approaching on Jan. 19. But there’s plenty of uncertainty about what will actually happen to the app on that day. TIME talked to experts, who contend that regardless of what actually happens on Sunday, the TikTok user experience is likely to drastically degrade in the weeks to come.

Will users be able to access TikTok?

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There’s a strong possibility that TikTok will shut down completely. During a Supreme Court hearing last week, a lawyer for TikTok said that the app will “go dark” if the court didn’t pause the ban. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that TikTok is preparing to shut its app on Sunday: that anyone who tries to log onto the app will be directed to a message alerting them to the ban and prompting them to download their data if they wish to do so. Users in India, which banned TikTok in 2020, are met with a similar message.

A full website block would go above and beyond what the law mandates, which prohibits app stores and third party service providers from hosting the app and its related data. Let’s say ByteDance, the Chinese companies that owns TikTok, simply adhered to that set of rules. On Sunday, new users would be cut off from downloading the app. Those with TikTok already on their phone, however, would still have access to the app, and not risk any legal penalties for logging on.

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But TikTok would no longer be able to update the software, making it buggier and slower over time. The app’s security would also weaken, making users more susceptible to hackers. In this scenario, TikTok would die a slow death, as its technology degrades and its social fabric weakens with users departing for other platforms. 

Is using a VPN an option?

Many TikTok users may attempt to use a VPN (virtual private network) or order to access the app. VPNs encrypt location data, allowing users to make it look like they’re somewhere else in the world. After X (formerly Twitter) was banned in Brazil, demand for VPNs skyrocketed, despite the government threatening users with a $9,000-a-day fine for using such workarounds. 

Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, says that VPNs would allow users to access TikTok legally. (The CDT joined an amicus brief supporting TikTok and its users.) But Ruane predicts that the experience will quickly worsen for those users, especially because TikTok files won’t be allowed to be hosted within the U.S. “There will be distance that data has to travel, which may degrade the service, since video in particular is highly dependent upon high fidelity broadband Internet access,” she says. 

Bruce Randall Donald, a computer science and math professor at Duke University, adds that VPNs may not work very well on smartphones, the very medium that TikTok is designed for. “They’re not going to work very well on appliances like an iPhone, iPad or Android, which don’t have the full strength of VPN security,” he says. “The experience is likely to be more glitch-free on a laptop or desktop. But if you’ve ever used TikTok on a laptop or desktop, it’s not a very satisfying experience.”

Read More: Why So Many TikTokers Are Moving to the Chinese App Red Note Ahead of Ban

Will the U.S. government intervene?

Some members of the government have been trying to save TikTok from its imminent demise. On Wednesday, a group of legislators led by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey introduced the Extend the TikTok Deadline Act, aiming to pause the ban for 270 days. But the original ban was passed with wide bipartisan support, and it is unlikely that this new bill will make it through both chambers in time.

President-elect Donald Trump is also interested in pausing the ban, arguing that he should have time as president to pursue a “political resolution” of the issue. Once he becomes President, he could temporarily pause the law if ByteDance has started the process to sell TikTok. But ByteDance has repeatedly stated that the app is not for sale. 

Trump could also order his Justice Department to refrain from enforcing the law, essentially rendering it toothless and nullifying its power. In the Supreme Court oral arguments last week, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar acknowledged that the President has the discretion to do so. But she also said that if ByteDance or third-party providers continued to operate TikTok in the U.S., they would be violating the law, which would make them susceptible to future enforcement. 

Ruane voiced a similar sentiment. “Even if President Trump and the incoming Attorney General say ‘I will not be enforcing this law,’ there would still be significant legal risk for the companies to which the law applies that they may not be willing to take on,” she says. “Because should the decision ever change, they could be subject to significant penalties.”

Donald predicts that most companies who could feasibly provide TikTok services may instead choose to play it safe. “If they’re not in compliance for at least some period of time, there’s a vulnerability there, with a market cap and shareholder situation, that would be actually somewhat dangerous,” he says.

So while there are several loopholes for users to remain on TikTok, strong disincentives will likely lead to a steep decline in terms of platform experience. Government intervention, meanwhile, seems increasingly distant. So unless something drastically unexpected occurs in the next week, creators would be wise to search for a replacement platform.

Why So Many TikTokers Are Moving to the Chinese App Red Note Ahead of Ban

14 January 2025 at 17:27
Red Note

With the TikTok ban looming in less than a week, creators are scrambling to find a replacement. Many have simply migrated over to TikTok’s direct American competitors, like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. But another unlikely challenger has emerged: the Chinese-owned Xiaohongshu, a social media app often referred to as Red Note in English. 

While Red Note had previously catered almost exclusively to Chinese audiences, Americans are flooding onto the platform this week, making it the number one on the App Store for two days straight. Lemon8, a separate Chinese social media app owned by TikTok’s owner ByteDance, sits at number two. On those apps, Chinese influencers and fashionistas appear in between American newcomers showing off their woodworking or floating down the Mississippi River. 

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It is unlikely Americans will settle on Red Note or Lemon8 long term: They face the same regulatory pressures that TikTok does. But these apps’ ascendance does reveal an acute desire from Americans to find their next social media destination; their general wariness about TikTok’s top American competitors; and their discontent with a ban that many see as paternalistic. 

“It was a bit of a spite thing—and I also wanted to be one of the first people over there,” says Christina Shuler, an entrepreneur who runs the small business Glam Farmhouse and joined Red Note this week. “Hopefully I can be part of the crowd that maybe can change how our government views this whole situation.” 

TikTok’s Ban

TikTok’s likely shuttering stems from a bill passed by Congress last year, which forced the app’s parent company ByteDance to either sell it by Jan. 19, or face a ban in the U.S. TikTok took the law to court, arguing a violation of freedom of speech. But last week, Supreme Court Justices expressed skepticism about the company’s legal arguments. Because ByteDance has said it will not sell TikTok, the ban will likely go into effect Sunday. (The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Chinese officials have discussed the possibility of allowing Elon Musk to invest in or run the company’s U.S. operations.)

Read More: TikTok’s Fate Arrives at the Supreme Court

So many users are looking to establish themselves on other platforms. American companies have been preparing for this influx: Snap, for instance, announced a new Monetization Program last month, which places ads within eligible creators’ videos. 

But this week, Red Note and Lemon8 seem to be the main beneficiaries. Red Note was founded in 2013 as an online shopping guide before pivoting towards social media and e-commerce. Over 300 million people use the app, which is filled with Mandarin speakers delivering travelogues, beauty tutorials, animal videos and language lessons. Red Note also has a live online marketplace, a format extremely common in Asia, but much less prevalent in the U.S. While some new users noted that the name Red Note seems to allude to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, the company has stressed that the names are unconnected. 

Before this week, the few American users of Red Note had included musicians looking to tap into the Chinese market, like John Legend and Mariah Carey. This week, a wave of TikTokkers announced on that app that they would be migrating over to Red Note, and encouraged their followers to join them. 

Marcus Robinson, a 29-year-old fashion designer, created a Red Note account to share his thrifting adventures and promote his clothing company, P-13. He previously had accrued 21,000 followers on TikTok, and estimates that 40% of his brand’s sales came from that app. “I thought I was going to keep building and make a living ultimately,” he says.

Robinson heard about Red Note on TikTok, set up an account, and started posting. After just 36 hours on the app, he already has nearly 10,000 followers and 22,000 likes. He engages with his Mandarin-language followers thanks to translations and captions provided by CapCut, an AI-powered video editing app owned by ByteDance. “I honestly feel like my brand will grow a lot quicker than it did on TikTok,” he says. “They’re all asking for clothes, asking me to model clothes. Everything’s flying right now.” 

Shuler, the 32-year-old woodworker based in South Carolina, had been earning money from TikTok thanks to brand partnerships, the Creator Rewards program, and product commissions. Her first post on Red Note, in which she announced herself as a TikTok refugee and gave a tutorial on how to install a sliding barn door, received 10,000 likes. “Right now, everyone’s so positive and people are caring,” she says. Other videos containing the hashtag “TikTokrefugee” have been viewed 100 million times. 

Shuler says that her posts on Red Note are already performing better than those on the Meta platforms Instagram and Facebook. “Unless you pay Meta to promote your posts, they’re not really going to show it to people—so I’ve seen a significant drop in engagement on both of those platforms,” she says. “And Facebook is just a bunch of angry people on there. So it was refreshing to get on Red Note and know that my content was appreciated.” 

Shuler says she’s even been learning a few Mandarin phrases thanks to the app. Neither she nor Robinson are particularly concerned about the data privacy worries associated with Chinese apps. “If you’ve already bought anything from Temu or Shien, I feel like whatever data that they want, they probably already have,” she says. 

It is quite possible that Red Note’s honeymoon will be short-lived. Some users have expressed concern that Red Note will be quicker to censor content that is political, sexual or LBGTQ-related. And Red Note also faces a potential ban: While Congress’s Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act singles out TikTok and other ByteDance apps, it also regulates other “foreign adversary controlled applications.” 

“Nobody thinks rednote is a viable long-term replacement,” wrote one Redditor on Monday. “This is just a form of protest; a big middle finger to the US government and their billionaire masters.”

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