“TikTok is here — we are here,” Khartoon Weiss, the company’s vice president of global business solutions, told a packed warehouse of advertisers on Tuesday in Manhattan. “We are absolutely confident in our platform and confident in the future of this platform,” she declared. That statement was the closest TikTok advertising executives got to addressing…
And yet, perhaps after simply being confronted with the possibility of Jessie’s demise, I’ve developed a new fondness for her. Jessie doesn’t pretend to be the ideal woman; she has less in common with the imperfectly perfect Alexa than she does the deep, resonant and pompously put-on voice of authority that Laurie Anderson cultivated in…
TikTok was fined 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday for violating a European Union data privacy law after regulators found the company had improperly transferred users’ personal data to China. The Irish Data Protection Commission, which announced the penalty, said TikTok failed to adequately protect data of its users in Europe, including some that…
The House on Monday overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation to criminalize the nonconsensual sharing of sexually explicit photos and videos of others — including A.I.-generated images known as “deepfakes” — and to mandate that platforms quickly remove them. The vote of 409 to 2 cleared the measure for President Trump, who was expected to quickly sign…
With many Americans concerned that President Trump’s tariffs will make most products more expensive and possibly tip the United States into a recession, some consumers say they are opting out of spending on a wide range of items. Instead of shopping lists, they are making “No Buy” lists. No more outfits destined to be worn…
Chinese manufacturers are flooding TikTok and other social media apps with direct appeals to American shoppers, urging people to buy luxury items straight from their factories. And amid the threats of sky-high tariffs on Chinese exports, Americans seem to be all in. The pitch in the videos is that people can buy leggings and handbags…
Listen to and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube | iHeartRadio This week, with the tech world in chaos over President Trump’s tariffs, we look at how four specific companies are navigating the new day-to-day reality. Then, the A.I. researcher Daniel Kokotajlo returns to the show to discuss a new set of…
The Chinese internet giant ByteDance has made some of the world’s most popular apps: TikTok and, in China, Douyin and Toutiao. In the United States, TikTok claims 170 million users. But in China, about 700 million use the domestic version, Douyin, and 300 million scroll the headlines on Toutiao, a news app. Every video that…
Last Wednesday, the Trump administration believed it had a plan to save TikTok. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, along with some of its U.S. investors and officials in Washington had coalesced around a new ownership structure for the popular video app, four people familiar with the situation said. That structure, the people said, would help TikTok…
President Trump on Friday granted TikTok another reprieve by announcing that he would extend the deadline for when the popular app had to make a deal to be separated from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States. TikTok, which had been facing a Saturday deadline for a deal, now has…