Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/24 – What Now For TikTok?

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

The TikTok divestment bill has probably already been signed into law. What happens now? What are the legal arguments that this thing can stick? What about things like, you know, the First Amendment? Also, ads in Windows? Time to take Meta’s RayBan smartglasses seriously? And what it’s like to use AI inside of Instagram. Links: Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to President Biden’s desk (The Verge) TikTok Ban Looms With Biden Poised to Start 270-Day Countdown (Bloomberg) How the TikTok ban could survive a court challenge (Platformer) Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone (The Verge) The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses get video calling, Apple Music, and a new style (The Verge) Meta’s A.I. Assistant Is Fun to Use, but It Can’t Be Trusted (NYTimes) "First Ones" YouTube Videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Wednesday, April 24th, 2024. I'm Brian McCalla today. The TikTok divestment bill has probably already been signed into law. So what happens now? What are the legal arguments that this thing can stick? What about things like, you know, the First Amendment? Also,

ads and windows. Time to take meta's Rayband smart glasses seriously, question mark, and what it's like to use AI inside of, say, Instagram. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It is done. The United States. Senate has passed the TikTok divestment bill by a margin of 79 to 18. The legislation now heads to President Biden, who has committed to sign the bill into law, which he probably has done by the time you hear this. Quoting the verge, once signed by the president, bite dance would have up to a year to complete a sale of TikTok or face an effective ban for the platform in the U.S. The bill gives bite dance an initial nine months and gives the president discretion to extend it another

three should there be progress toward a deal. Still, legal challenges could possibly delay enforcement. Congress is not acting to punish bite-dance, TikTok, or any other individual company. Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, Congress is acting to prevent foreign adversaries from conducting espionage surveillance maligned operations and harming vulnerable Americans, our service men and women, and our U.S. government personnel, end quote. The truth is, these Chinese companies at the end of the day, they don't owe their obligation to their customers or their shareholders, but they owe it to the PRC government, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner said.

In the context of social media platforms used by nearly half of Americans, it's not hard to imagine how a platform that facilitates so much commerce, political discourse, and social debate could be covertly manipulated to serve the goals of an authoritarian regime, one with a long track record of censorship, transnational repression, and promotion of disinformation, end quote. also address the concerns of many young Americans who use TikTok and fear this legislation means it will go away. I want to make clear to all Americans, this is not an effort to take your voice away, Warner said. Many Americans, particularly young Americans, are rightfully skeptical. At the end of the day, they've not seen what Congress has seen. They've not been in the classified

briefings that Congress has held, which have delved more deeply into some of the threats posed by foreign control of TikTok, end quote. More on the next steps here from Bloomberg, quote, President Joe Biden plans to sign the legislation Wednesday, beginning a 270-day countdown for a sale or a U.S. prohibition of the popular video sharing platform. TikTok and Beijing-based bite dance have vowed to do all they can to stop the measure. They've argued it infringes the free speech rights of the apps 170 million monthly U.S. users and plan to file suits to void the law or at least delay its enforcement. With the legal battle set to unfold, TikTok's U.S. users face a wave of uncertainty about a place to express themselves via video, make money as influencers, or sell wares on TikTok shop. If implemented, a TikTok ban would risk, quote, disrupting a critical channel for engaging with younger audiences

and building brand visibility, said Damien Rawlison, director of market insights at Sock Eye. Bightdance sees a TikTok divestager as a last resort, according to people familiar with the matter. TikTok's parent expects it can get a restraining order on the legislation, then wage a legal battle that could last more than a year, Bloomberg has reported. If TikTok can't slow enforcement through the legal system, another chance of avoiding a separation may lie with a new administration. Biden's signing the bill on Wednesday puts the divestiture deadline to January 19th, a day before the next presidential inauguration, end quote. Now the legal end of this. Legal scholars say the TikTok divestment bill could survive a First Amendment challenge, and the U.S. will likely rely on a national security argument to make their case.

from platformer, quote, The Supreme Court has previously held that Congress can't ban foreign propaganda, including propaganda from China. In Lamont v. Postmaster General, the court considered a law that required the Postmaster General to detain, quote, communist political propaganda sent through the mail. The post office was then required to send the addressee a card asking whether they wanted the propaganda to be delivered in what the court ultimately ruled had an unconstitutional chilling effect on speech.

If Congress can't even require people, to fill out a form to receive propaganda, the logic goes. It seems even less likely that the Supreme Court would find that Congress could ban TikTok over the still unsupported claims that it is deliberately amplifying pro-China or pro-Hamas content. It's a fundamental principle of the First Amendment that the government can't ban speech on the basis that they don't like it, or that they're convinced it's going to convince people of ideas they don't like, said Evelyn Doak, an assistant professor of law at Stanford Law School and First Amendment scholar who pointed me to the Lamont case. For that reason, the government probably won't rest its arguments on the idea that it

has a right to ban propaganda. What about data privacy? Another core argument made by Congress in deliberations over the TikTok ban is that the Chinese government could force BightDance to turn over user data for surveillance or other nefarious purposes. But the government will likely struggle to make a convincing argument that banning TikTok is necessary for protecting Americans in this way, scholars said. If the Chinese government wants data on Americans, they don't need TikTok to get it, wrote Alan Z. Rosenstein, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota in a piece for lawfare on Monday. They don't even need to steal it. The United States is a notorious outlier among developed nations for its lack of a national data privacy law. This means that the Chinese can

just buy from data brokers and other third-party aggregators much of the same information that they would get from having access to TikTok user data, end quote. The data privacy argument may strike courts as particularly weak given the dramatic restriction on speech that will come with banning an app used by 170 million Americans. It's the worst imaginable means of trying to protect users' privacy because it's going to shut down an entire vibrant platform or require its divestment, said Genevieve Lockyer, a law professor at the University of Chicago, and even if Bight Dance were willing to divest from TikTok and preserve the platform as it exists today, forcing it to do so, could also be considered an unconstitutional violation of its speech rights,

she said. That leads to the argument that the government is likely to make the loudest in court, that banning TikTok is necessary to protect national security. China is an adversary of the United States and may one day seek to exploit its control over a major news and information network like TikTok, the argument goes. Therefore, Congress has a compelling interest in preventing it from doing so. Of all the arguments the government could make, this one is most likely to resonate with the Supreme Court, Rojnstein said in an interview. The government can't just say national security and do whatever it wants, he said, but courts, including the Supreme Court, just give a lot more leeway to the government in First Amendment cases about national security, end quote.

What arguments might the government make? Rosenstein expects to see discussion of China's active manipulation of domestic media, including sweeping censorship and propaganda efforts. The State Department last year published a comprehensive report on China's efforts to reshape the global information ecosystem, which found that it, quote, employs a variety of deceptive and coercive methods, end quote. At the same time, Congress has shared no public evidence that BytDance or TikTok have manipulated recommendation algorithms to spread pro-China propaganda or otherwise undermine national security

for the ban to stick, the government first has to prove that it isn't about the content of the speech of TikTok. Assuming the courts accept that argument, they would likely apply what is known as intermediate scrutiny to the government's case that this is a privacy and security issue. And in that case, Lockyer said, the government would typically have to provide evidence of a threat large enough to justify eliminating a significant platform for speech. First Amendment cases have been clear for 100 years now that even when regulating speech in a content-neutral way, the government needs to have really good evidence for what it's doing, she said. The thing about intermediate scrutiny is that we don't take the government at its word. It has to show its work, end quote. Microsoft has

begun rolling out ads in the Windows 11 start menu showing app recommendations from, quote, a small set of curated developers. Users can disable the ads, but still, quoting the verge. The recommended section of the start menu will show some Microsoft store apps, says Microsoft in the update notes of its latest public Windows 11 release. These apps come from a small set of curated developers. The ads are designed to help Windows 11 users discover more apps, but will largely benefit the developers that Microsoft is trying to tempt into building more Windows apps. Microsoft only started testing these ads two weeks ago, so it's surprising to see this feature progress from Beta Channel to release in such a short period of time. At the time of initial testing,

I mentioned, Microsoft could decide to ditch these ads if there was enough feedback that suggested they weren't popular, but two weeks of feedback certainly isn't long enough to determine that. Luckily, you can disable these ads or recommendations, as Microsoft calls them. If you've installed the latest update and head into settings, personalization, start, and turn off the toggle for show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more. While this is optional right now, Microsoft will push this on all Windows 11 machines in the coming week. Microsoft's move to enable ads in the Windows 11 start menu follows similar promotional spots in the Windows 10 lock screen and start menu. Microsoft also started testing ads inside the file explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment, and saying the test was not intended to be published externally. Hopefully that experiment remains very much an experiment, end quote.

Hey, look, the amount of ads that pop up on my iPhone from Apple for their services, some of which I already pay for, is way more intrusive, I would say even from this. Given what we've been talking about vis-a-vis AI hardware, maybe I need to pay more attention to Meta's Rayban smart glasses. They've apparently just gotten support for video calling via WhatsApp and Messenger, also hands-free Apple music controls and a new frame style, quoting the verge. CEO Mark Zuckerberg just dropped an Instagram reel showing off a new cat-eye frame style for the glasses and a video calling feature. You can also now connect the glasses with Apple Music, and last but not least, the multimodal AI assistant, that is.

is live for everyone in the U.S. and Canada. You can peep a pretty clear demo of the video calling feature from Zuckerberg's reel in it. He talks to Eva Chen, who runs fashion at Instagram, about the new Skylar frames and chain lengths, of all things. The existing Wayfarer and headliner models are also getting some new colors. The headliner, which has rounded lenses, is also getting a low bridge fit for folks who have issues with glasses slipping down their face. As for video calling, you can call up friends and family via both WhatsApp and Messenger. Meta's blog, notes. that you might not see this feature right away, however, as it's rolling out more gradually. Another feature not mentioned in the blog is Apple Music compatibility, however, the feature

appeared this morning in the Meta View app, which pairs with the glasses. The instructions note that you'll be able to control Apple Music hands-free to play any song, playlist, station, or artist. You can also request recommendations based on your listening history. Lastly, Meta rolled out an early access program for its multimodal AI back in December. Starting today, it's rolling out to everyone who has a pair of the glasses in the U.S. in Canada and beta. The feature allows you to take pictures with the glasses and have Meta's AI give you more context. For instance, you'll be able to ask it to identify a plant species, come up with Instagram captions, and translate a sign written in a foreign language, end quote.

Finally today, a product review of sorts, Brian X. Chen went hands-on with the Meta-AI chatbot that has been popping up in Meta's family of apps. He says the AI fails at basic search queries stinks at counting excels at editing existing paragraphs, quickly creates images, and more. Quote, meta-announced its chatbot as a replacement for web search by typing queries for meta-AI into the search bar at the top of Messenger or Instagram. A group of friends planning a trip could look up flights while chatting, the company said, I'll be blunt. Don't do this. Meta-I phil spectacularly at basic search queries like looking up recipes, airfares, and weekend activities. In response to my request to look up flights from New York to Colorado, the chatbot listed instructions

on how to take public transportation from the Denver airport to downtown. And when I asked for flights from Oakland, California to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, the bot listed flights departing from Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Unsurprisingly, Meta's assistant stinks at counting. When you ask it for a five-syllable word starting with the letter W, it will respond with wonderfully, which has four syllables. When you ask it for a four-syllable, word starting with W, it will offer Wonderful, which has three syllables. Gemini and ChatGPT also fail at these tests. It should be noted. Because MetaAI is better when it works with existing texts, it can be helpful for studying. For instance, if you're taking a history class and studying World War II, you can paste a website with information about the war into the search bar and then ask the bot to quiz you. The chatbot will read the information on the website and generate a multiple choice test. Meta's AI is much faster than other image generators like mid-journey, which can take more than a minute. The results can be very weird, images of people occasionally lacked limbs or looked cross-eyed. In a group conversation with my in-laws, I mentioned

I was shopping for a robust baby stroller that could withstand the crooked roads of my neighborhood. In seconds, my wife used meta-AI to generate an image of a stroller with enormous wheels that made it resemble a monster truck stamped with a helpful label that said, imagined with AI, end quote. Okay, so that project I told you about recently is launching today. It's called First Ones. It's a limited run series on YouTube. Every bonus episode interview we've done this year, I've had people stay on the line with me for about 10 more minutes

to record their answers to a series of first ones questions. Largely centered around tech, first computer, first phone, first time online, but also first job, first car, first career win, first movie in a theater. etc. They're just fun little 10-minute videos. Everyone we spoke to this year is on there. Nat Friedman, Chris Dixon, John Gruber, Baratune Day Thurston, Jay Graber, etc. I might eventually release the audio of these interviews on the podcast feed, but what's fun about video is if someone mentions an old gadget, I can pop up pictures of the thing and little researched facts about them. Link to the entire playlist is the final link in the show notes today. Check it out. This is my

sort of hack to see if I can entice the Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates's of the world to come on the show. So pump up those view counts. So the PR teams of everyone from Apple to OpenAI, we'll see it's a fun little way to get nostalgic. Talk to you tomorrow.