ReportWire

Tag: iab-business and finance

  • TV and film writers are fighting to save their jobs from AI. They won’t be the last | CNN Business

    TV and film writers are fighting to save their jobs from AI. They won’t be the last | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    By any standard, John August is a successful screenwriter. He’s written such films as “Big Fish,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Go.” But even he is concerned about the impact AI could have on his work.

    A powerful new crop of AI tools, trained on vast troves of data online, can now generate essays, song lyrics and other written work in response to user prompts. While there are clearly limits for how well AI tools can produce compelling creative stories, these tools are only getting more advanced, putting writers like August on guard.

    “Screenwriters are concerned about our scripts being the feeder material that is going into these systems to generate other scripts, treatments, and write story ideas,” August, a Writers Guild of America (WGA) committee member, told CNN. “The work that we do can’t be replaced by these systems.”

    August is one of the more than 11,000 members of the WGA who went on strike Tuesday morning, bringing an immediate halt to the production of some television shows and possibly delaying the start of new seasons of others later this year.

    WGA is demanding a host of changes from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), from an increase in pay to receiving clear guidelines around working with streaming services. But as part of their demands, the WGA is also fighting to protect their livelihoods from AI.

    In a proposal published on WGA’s website this week, the labor union said AI should be regulated so it “can’t write or rewrite literary material, can’t be used as source material” and that writers’ work “can’t be used to train AI.”

    August said the AI demand “was one of the last things” added to the WGA list, but that it’s “clearly an issue writers are concerned about” and need to address now rather than when their contact is up again in three years. By then, he said, “it may be too late.”

    WGA said the proposal was rejected by AMPTP, which countered by offering annual meetings to discuss advancements in the technology. August said AMPTP’s response shows they want to keep their options open.

    In a document sent to CNN responding to some of WGA’s asks, AMPTP said it values the work of creatives and “the best stories are original, insightful and often come from people’s own experiences.”

    “AI raises hard, important creative and legal questions for everyone,” it wrote. “Writers want to be able to use this technology as part of their creative process, without changing how credits are determined, which is complicated given AI material can’t be copyrighted. So it’s something that requires a lot more discussion, which we’ve committed to doing.”

    It added that the current WGA agreement defines a “writer” as a “person,” and said “AI-generated material would not be eligible for writing credit.”

    The writers’ attempt at bargaining over AI is perhaps the most high-profile labor battle yet to address concerns about the cutting-edge technology that has captivated the world’s attention in the six months since the public release of ChatGPT.

    Goldman Sachs economists estimate that as many as 300 million full-job jobs globally could be automated in some way by the newest wave of AI. White-collar workers, including those in administrative and legal roles, are expected to be the most affected. And the impact may hit sooner than some think: IBM’s CEO recently suggested AI could eliminate the need for thousands of jobs at his company alone in the next five years.

    David Gunkel, a professor at the department of communications at Northern Illinois University who tracks AI in media and entertainment, said screenwriters want clear guidelines around AI because “they can see the writing on the wall.”

    “AI is already displacing human labor in many other areas of content creation—copywriting, journalism, SEO writing, and so on,” he said. “The WGA is simply trying to get out-in-front of and to protect their members against … ‘technological unemployment.’”

    While film and TV writers in Hollywood may currently be leading the charge, professionals in other industries will almost certainly be paying attention.

    “There’s certainly other industries that need to be paying close attention to this space,” said Rowan Curran, an analyst at Forrester Research who focuses on AI. He noted that digital artists, musicians, engineers, real estate professionals and customer service workers will all feel the impact of generative AI.

    “Watch this #WGA strike carefully,” Justine Bateman, a writer, director and former actress, wrote in a tweet shortly after the strike kicked off. “Understand that our fight is the same fight that is coming to your professional sector next: it’s the devaluing of human effort, skill, and talent in favor of automation and profits.”

    AI has had a place in Hollywood for years. In the 2018 “Marvel Avengers Infinity Wars” film, the face of Thanos – a character played by actor Josh Brolin – was created in part with the technology.

    Crowd and battle scenes in films including the “Lord of the Rings” and “Meg” have utilized AI, and the most recent Indiana Jones used it to make Harrison Ford’s character appear younger. It’s also been used for color correction, finding footage more quickly during post production and making improvements such as removing scratches and dust from footage.

    But AI in screenwriting is in its infancy. In March, a “South Park” episode called “Deep Learning,” was co-written by ChatGPT and the tool was highly focused on in the plot (the characters use ChatGPT to talk to girls and write school papers).

    August said writers are largely willing to play ball with tools, as long as they’re used as launching pads or for research and writers are still credited and utilized throughout the production process.

    “Screenwriters are not luddites, and we’ve been quick to use new technologies to help us tell our stories,” August said. “We went from typewriters to word processors happily and it increased productivity. …. But we don’t need a magical typewriter that types scripts all by itself.”

    Because large language models are trained on text that humans have written before, and find patterns in words and sentences to create responses to prompts, concerns around intellectual property exist, too. “It is entirely possible for a [chatbot] to generate a script in the style of a particular kind of filmmaker or scriptwriter without prior consent of the original artist or the Hollywood studio that holds the IP for that material,” Gunkel said.

    For example, one could prompt ChatGPT to generate a zombie apocalypse drama in the style of David Mamet. “Who should get credited for that?” August said. “What happens if we allow a producer or studio executive to come up with a treatment or pitch or something that looks like a screenplay that no writer has touched?”

    For now, the legal landscape remains very much unsettled on the matter, with regulations lagging behind the rapid pace of AI development. In early April, the Biden administration said it is seeking public comments on how to hold artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT accountable.

    “We can’t protect studios from their own bad choices,” August said. “We can only protect writers from abuses.”

    The strike, and the demands around AI specifically, come at a time when both the writers and the studios are feeling financial pain.

    Many of the businesses represented by AMPTP have seen drops in their stock price, prompting deep cost cutting, including layoffs. The need to manage costs, combined with addressing the fallout from the strike, might only make the companies feel more pressure to turn to AI for scriptwriting.

    “In the short term, this could be an effective way to circumvent the WGA strike, mainly because [large language models], which are considered property and not personnel, can be employed for this task without violating the picket line,” Gunkel said. Such an “experiment” could also show production studios whether it’s possible “to get by with less humans involved,” he said.

    But Joshua Glick, a visiting professor of film and electronic arts at Bard University, believes such a move would be ill-advised.

    “It would be a pretty aggressive and antagonistic move for studios to move forward with AI-generated scripts in terms of getting writers to come to the negotiating table because AI is such a crucial sticking point in the negotiations,” said Glick, who also co-created Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen, an exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

    “At the same time, I think the result of those scripts would be pretty mediocre at best,” he said.

    However the studios react, the issue is unlikely to go away in Hollywood. Film and TV actors’ contracts are up in June, and many are worried about how their faces, bodies and voices will be impacted by AI, August said.

    “As writers, we don’t want tools to replace us but actors have the same concerns with AI, as do directors, editors and everyone else who does creative work in this industry,” he added.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies | CNN Business

    Amazon corporate workers plan walkout next week over return-to-office policies | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Some Amazon corporate workers have announced plans to walk off the job next week over frustrations with the company’s return-to-work policies, among other issues, in a sign of heightened tensions inside the e-commerce giant after multiple rounds of layoffs.

    The work stoppage is being jointly organized by an internal climate justice worker group and a remote work advocacy group, according to an email from organizers and public social media posts.

    Workers participating have two main demands: asking the e-commerce giant to put climate impact at the forefront of its decision making, and to provide greater flexibility for how and where employees work.

    The lunchtime walkout is scheduled for May 31, beginning at noon. Organizers have said in an internal pledge that they are only going to go through with the walkout if at least 1,000 workers agree to participate, according to an email from organizers.

    The Washington Post was first to report the planned walkout.

    The collective action from corporate workers comes after Amazon, like other Big Tech companies, cut tens of thousands of jobs beginning late last year amid broader economic uncertainty. All told, Amazon has said this year that it is laying off some 27,000 workers in multiple rounds of cuts.

    At the same time, Amazon and other tech companies are trying to get workers into the office more. In February, Amazon said it was requiring thousands of its workers to be in the office for at least three days per week, starting on May 1.

    “Morale is really at an all-time low right now,” an Amazon corporate worker based in Los Angeles, who plans on participating in the walkout next week, told CNN. “I think the hope from this walkout is really to send a clear message to leadership that we’re expecting real action from them on a number of issues, with the thesis of just, like, we need better long term decision-making that benefits not only employees but the communities that we serve.”

    The worker, who asked not to be named, said organizers are focusing the in-person walkout efforts at the company’s Seattle headquarters but have also created a way for people to participate virtually so “all Amazonians are welcome to participate.”

    One of the internal groups spearheading next week’s walkout is dubbed Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), the same coalition that organized protests slamming the company for inaction on climate change back in 2019.

    “Amazon must keep pace with a changing world,” the group wrote in a Twitter thread Tuesday calling for the walkout next week. “To cultivate a diverse, world-class workplace, we need real plans to tackle our climate impact and flexible work options.”

    Amazon’s Climate Pledge, signed in 2019, commits the company to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, among other climate goals. But in the Twitter thread, the group blasted the pledge as “hype” and demanded “a genuine climate plan.”

    Amazon said it has made progress in meeting its goals, including by putting thousands of electric delivery vehicles on the road, and by continuing to invest in both proven and new science-backed solutions for reducing carbon emissions. Amazon also said it had the goal of powering 100% of its operations with renewable energy by 2030, and now expects to meet that goal by 2025.

    “We respect our employees’ rights to express their opinions,” Rob Munoz, an Amazon spokesperson, told CNN in a statement Tuesday.

    In response to employee concerns about the return to office, Munoz said the company has “had a great few weeks with more employees in the office.”

    “There’s been good energy on campus and in urban cores like Seattle where we have a large presence. We’ve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices,” Munoz said. “As it pertains to the specific topics this group of employees is raising, we’ve explained our thinking in different forums over the past few months and will continue to do so.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Teachers are on the front lines of a battle to change how teens use social media | CNN Business

    Teachers are on the front lines of a battle to change how teens use social media | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A high school English class may not sound like the typical forum for educating kids on the risks of social media, but that hasn’t stopped Jennifer Rosenzweig.

    Each school year, the 10th graders in her class at Scarsdale High School in New York watch “The Social Dilemma,” a 2020 documentary about the harms of social media. She also teaches her students about how companies can manipulate algorithms to make platforms addictive and is part of the school’s leadership team that hosts related social media training sessions for teachers and parents.

    Rosenzweig argues the subject is so important that it should be discussed in all courses.

    “It’s really important to give students lots of opportunities to talk about, think about, write about how social media affects their lives,” she said. “They just happened to be born in a really complicated, overstimulating and demanding time – and we handed them these devices without knowing what effect they would have.”

    Rosenzweig is one of a growing number of educators who find themselves on the front lines of a fight to change how students use social media, both in schools and at home, after rising concerns about the impact these services can have on the mental health of teens. And recently, there has been a push for more schools to effectively follow their example and develop programs to help educate students on the dangers of social media.

    As part of US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s watershed report last month on the “profound risks” of social media for teens, he recommended policymakers push for “digital and media literacy curricula in schools” that help students “recognize, manage, and recover from online risks” such as harassment, abuse and “excessive social media use.”

    Other politicians have suggested the same. Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an education bill that prohibits students from accessing certain social media platforms on school Wi-Fi and requires instruction on the negative impacts of social media.

    These efforts come amid heightened bipartisan pressure from lawmakers for social media companies to do more to protect their youngest users. But in the absence of any new federal legislation, the burden falls on parents and schools, the latter of which faces significant challenges to address the issue.

    Schools must grapple with limited resources, students who develop online habits at a very young age and staff who may not be well versed to discuss the ins and outs of algorithmic rabbit holes and cyberbullying.

    At the Roycemore School in Evanston, Illinois, conversations around the impact of social media are happening in the classroom on a daily basis, according to Chris English, the head of school.

    Teachers openly remind students how their social media history lives on and how it can be perceived among colleges and employers, English said. Teachers also discuss how dopamine plays a role in why teens feel the need to keep checking platforms as well as general best practices.

    “We are always thinking about the social-emotional learning component … and how it applies to social media use,” said English, referring to teaching kids skills to manage their feelings and relationships.

    Chris English, head of school at The Roycemore School in Evanston, Illinois, said the school has seen success from participating in the

    As with other education efforts, however, he believes social media literacy campaigns are much easier to do when class sizes in school are lower, allowing teachers to put more significant time and energy into each student.

    The Roycemore school is one of hundreds of schools across the US leaning on programs such as The Organization for Social Media Safety to provide digital literacy assemblies to students. The organization offers practical steps to address the varying dangers they may encounter on social media, from bullying and hate to trafficking and pressured sexting, as well as how algorithms can push problematic content to young users. The program is part of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) curriculum.

    “Many students don’t even understand most of these dangers,” said Marc Berkman, director of The Organization for Social Media Safety. “They can’t protect themselves from the dangers if they don’t know what they are.”

    Devorah Heitner, author of “Screenwise, Speaker: Raising Kids in the Digital Age,” previously told CNN that schools of all sizes should embrace digital literacy because teens need to learn how to properly function in online communities, as that is the expectation both going into college and in their professional lives.

    “Literacy should not just be ‘don’t look at pornography’ or ‘stay off bad sites’ or ‘don’t cyberbully;’ that’s so limited,” she said. “It should also be understanding how algorithms work, how teens can respond or what to do when feeling excluded, or if they’re feeling insecure. We need to help kids with all these things.”

    The Organization for Social Media Safety provides parent workshops and community guidelines for guardians to reference as issues surface. Although Berkman said he’s encouraged by more teachers talking to students about the dangers of social media, he advises them to undergo formal training on the subject because it’s “not a check the box exercise” and requires “up to date knowledge on the rich landscape of how teens are using” these platforms.

    Digital literacy is not only playing out in high schools. Gillian Feldman, principal of Brawerman Elementary School in Los Angeles, said the school works with the Organization of Social Media Safety to provide educational sessions for parents of pre-teen and younger students to help them navigate social platforms.

    “Our kids are 12 when they leave our school, but they’re already using Fortnite and Roblox and other platforms which have social media components, with the ability to chat, post and Like things on these games,” Feldman said. “The [sessions] have been eye opening for parents and help them set better parameters for kids.”

    Feldman said the school is also taking a social-emotional approach to teaching its young students about social platforms, such as how they shouldn’t rely on “someone else’s approval to fill up your own [emotional] bucket.”

    While trying to teach students to develop a better relationship with technology, some schools are also pushing for them to ditch their devices entirely — at least during school hours.

    In September, Rosenzweig and her colleagues at Scarsdale High School introduced “Off and Away for the Day,” an effort that encourages students to keep smartphones in their book bags during the day.

    During free periods, the students are allowed to listen to music, podcasts or meditation apps but phones must be out of sight during class. Students can “briefly check phones if needed” during homeroom or lunch but not scroll social media or play games.

    A poster for Scarsdale High School's

    The decision came after teachers at Scarsdale High School observed a correlation between screen time and declining reading abilities and focus among its students. The school is currently working to develop consequences and formal guidelines, she said.

    “I would never claim that everyone is supportive of this initiative, and yes, students do roll their eyes about it for sure,” Rosenzweig said. “But what I do strongly claim is that when you speak to students for more than five minutes about this topic, they appreciate that we are talking about it and really do want the help.”

    English’s school has also embraced the “Away for the Day” policy, where students put smartphones out of sight while on campus. It’s part of a bigger grassroots movement of the same name developed by the co-producers of the 2016 documentary “Screenagers,” which looks at the lives of teens growing up in the digital age.

    Students are told to keep phones out of sight during the school day at The Roycemore School.

    Sabine Polack, who spoke to CNN in 2021 about how her 14-year-old daughter was struggling with depression and had contemplated suicide stemming from pressures around social media, is now an advocate of the “Away for the Day” movement to create phone free schools.

    “It’s especially relevant now that we have the Surgeon General issuing advisories which includes calling for ‘tech free spaces’ as a tool to help mitigate the mental health crisis our children are facing,” said Polack, who is on the board of nonprofit Fairplay, which aims to protect kids from harmful marketing and excessive screentime.

    Rosenzweig said she aims to expand “Off and Away” to other schools in the Scarsdale School District and is hopeful it can be a leading force making a change in their community and beyond.

    “Schools have so much power,” Rosenzweig said. “We are with these kids five days of the week and we can make those days look like whatever we can look like.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • I tried Apple’s new headset. Here’s what it’s like to use | CNN Business

    I tried Apple’s new headset. Here’s what it’s like to use | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    It’s rare to find a new technology that feels groundbreaking. But last night, while sitting on a couch in a private demo room at Apple’s campus wearing its newly announced Vision Pro mixed reality headset, it felt like I’d seen the future — or at least an early and very pricey prototype of it.

    In the demo, which lasted 30 minutes, a virtual butterfly landed on my finger; a dinosaur with detailed scales tried to bite me; and I stood inches away from Alicia Keys’ piano as she serenaded me in a recording studio. When a small bear cub swam by me on a quiet lake during another immersive video, it felt so real that it reminded me of an experience with a loved one who recently passed away. I couldn’t wipe the tears inside my headset.

    Apple unveiled the headset, its most ambitious and riskiest new hardware offering in years, at a developer event earlier in the day. The headset blends both virtual reality and augmented reality, a technology that overlays virtual images on live video of the real world. At the event, Apple CEO Tim Cook touted the Vision Pro as a “revolutionary product,” with the potential to change how users interact with technology, each other and the world around them. He called it “the first product you look through, not at.”

    But it’s clearly a work in progress. The apps and experiences remain limited; users must stay tethered to a battery pack the size of an iPhone with just two hours of battery life; and the first minutes using the device can be off-putting. Apple also plans to charge $3,499 for the device when it goes on sale early next year – more than had been rumored and far more than other headsets on the market that have previously struggled to gain wide adoption.

    With its loyal following and impressive track record on hardware, Apple may be able to convince developers, early adopters and some enterprise customers to pay up for the device. But if it wants to attract a more mainstream audience, it will need a “killer app,” as the industry often refers to it -— or several.

    Based on my demo, Apple still has a long way to go, but it’s off to a compelling start.

    Hours after the keynote event, I arrived at a building on Apple’s sprawling Cupertino, California, campus specifically constructed to stage demos and briefings for the new headset.

    I was met by an Apple employee who scanned my face to help customize the fit of the headset. Then I entered a small room where an optometrist asked if I wore glasses or corrective lenses. I had gotten Lasik surgery years ago, but others around me had their glasses scanned so the headset could present their specific prescription. It’s an incredible feat that differentiates Apple from competitors and ensures no frames need to be squeezed into the headset. But it’s unclear how the company plans to handle this process at scale if millions buy the device.

    The initial setup process was somewhat unpleasant: I felt a little nauseous and claustrophobic as I adjusted to the device. It tracked my eyes, scanned my hands and mapped the room to better tailor the augmented reality experience.

    But Apple has also taken steps to reduce the motion sickness problem that has plagued other headsets. The headset uses an R1 processor, a custom chip that cuts down on the latency issue found in similar products that can result in nausea.

    As many viewers were quick to point out on Monday, the headset itself looks like a pair of designer ski goggles. It features a soft adjustable strap on the top, a “digital crown” on the back – a bigger version than what you’d find on an Apple Watch – and another digital crown on the top that serves as a kind of home button. There’s also a wire connecting to an external battery pack.

    The headset itself felt light enough in the beginning, but even with Apple’s considerable design chops, I never shook the idea that there was a computer on my face. Fortunately, unlike other computing products, the headset did remain cool on my face throughout the experience, thanks largely to a quiet fan and airflow running through the system

    Unlike other headsets, the new mixed reality headset also displays the eyes of its users on the outside, so “you’re never isolated from the people around you, you can see them and they can see you,” Alan Dye, vice president of human interface, said during the keynote.

    Sadly, I never got to see how my own eyes or anyone else’s looked through the headset during the demo.

    After putting on the device, I saw an iOS-like interface. I could easily hop in and out of apps, such as Messages, FaceTime, Safari and Photos, using just my eye movements and touching my thumb and pointer finger together to act as the “select” button. This was more intuitive than expected and worked even when my hands rested on my lap.

    Some app experiences were better than others, however. It was beautiful to see images in the Photos app presented before me in a larger than life manner, but it’s hard to imagine feeling the need to do this often on a couch back home. Vision Pro also offers a spatial photo option, which lets users view images and videos in 3D so you feel like you’re directly in the scene. Again, cool but unnecessary.

    During another demo, an Apple employee wearing a Vision Pro headset FaceTimed me from the other side of campus. Her “persona” – a digital representation which did not show her wearing the Vision Pro – appeared in front of me as we chatted about the event earlier in the day. She seemed real but it was clear she was not; she was a sort of pseudo-human. (Apple did not scan my face to create my own persona, which would otherwise be done through its OpticID security feature during the setup phase.)

    The Apple employee then shared a virtual whiteboard – dragging, dropping and highlighting interior design images. Cook has focused on AR’s potential to foster collaboration, and it’s clear how this tool could be used in meetings to fulfill that promise. What’s less clear is why most employers would spend $3,499 per device per employee to make this happen rather than simply use Zoom.

    Like so much else about the product unveiling, this pitch felt mistimed. Earlier in the pandemic, more people might have jumped at the chance to create these virtual experiences while we worked and socialized almost entirely from home. Now, with more employees back in the office and companies looking to cut costs amid broader economic uncertainty, the justification for this pricey device seemed less clear.

    The real magic of the Vision Pro, however, is in the immersive videos. Watching an underwater scene from Avatar 2 in 3D, for example, was surreal, seemingly placing me right in the ocean with these fictional creatures. It’s easy to imagine buy-in from Hollywood filmmakers to create experiences just for the headset.

    Apple is also uniquely positioned here to supercharge the device with these experiences. It has close relationships in the entertainment industry, including with former Apple board member and Disney CEO Bob Iger, who announced in a pre-recorded video during the event that Disney+ will be available on the headset at launch. Apple teased new National Geographic, Marvel and ESPN experiences for the headset, too.

    Almost every new Apple product, from the iPhone to the Apple Watch, promises to use screens of varying sizes to change how we live, work and interact with the world. The Vision Pro has the potential to do all of that in an even more striking way. But unlike the first time I picked up an iPhone or a smartatch, after 30 minutes of using Vision Pro, I was very content to put it down and return to the real world.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • McCarthy and hardliners reach tentative agreement to resume House floor business | CNN Politics

    McCarthy and hardliners reach tentative agreement to resume House floor business | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Hardline conservatives have agreed to end their blockade of the House floor while they continue discussions with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy about future spending decisions and a new “power-sharing agreement,” according to multiple members leaving the speaker’s office.

    Conservatives who had voted against a procedural vote in retaliation for how GOP leadership handled the debt ceiling deal now say they are willing to support the procedural vote, after they received new commitments from McCarthy about how the California Republican plans to operate going forward, though they said the exact details are still being worked out and did not say whether they would ever be made public or put into a written statement.

    “I think you’re gonna see an agreement to move forward in the next day or two on moving the legislation we wanted to move last week,” said Rep. Bob Good, a Virginia Republican who has repeatedly criticized McCarthy.

    Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican, said of the nearly hourlong meeting in McCarthy’s office: “We aired our issues. We want to see this move forward as a body.”

    Norman said one of the things McCarthy agreed to was to involve conservatives more directly in future decision making.

    A group of hardline conservatives have held up legislative action in the GOP-led House for nearly a week in protest of the deal McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden to raise the nation’s borrowing limit last month. Conservatives wanted the debt ceiling deal to cut more federal spending than it did, and several far-right members of McCarthy’s conference accused him of reneging on commitments he made to them in private in order to win the speakership in January.

    McCarthy told the hardliners Monday that he wouldn’t have cut the debt ceiling deal had he known it would “divide us,” according to a GOP source familiar with the meeting.

    But McCarthy knew at the time that not all his members were going to be on board with the deal, with many of them publicly expressing their concerns with the direction of the talks.

    One of the concessions McCarthy agreed to as part of Monday’s developments was an ironclad commitment to bring a pistol brace bill from GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia to the floor. Leadership has agreed to incorporate the bill, which would block a new Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rule on pistol braces, into an upcoming procedural vote.

    That vote, which is slated for Tuesday, will now combine a rule for the pistol brace bill with a rule for a gas stoves bill as well as a bill to rein in the administration’s regulatory powers.

    GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said, “The power-sharing agreement that we entered into in January with McCarthy … it has to be renegotiated, so what happened on this debt ceiling bill never happens again.”

    Specifically, Gaetz said the hardliners want more tools to put more “downward pressure on spending,” and want a return to fiscal 2022 spending levels.

    House Appropriations Chairwoman Kay Granger announced Monday night that her panel will take up spending bills that would roll back funding to the levels demanded by the hardliners, a move that could ease tensions between the group and McCarthy while generating backlash from the White House and Senate Democrats.

    Gaetz said that while they’re willing to end their stand against the procedural vote this week, he warned that they’re willing to oppose future procedural votes if they don’t get their way.

    “If there’s not a renegotiated power sharing agreement then perhaps we’ll be here next week,” he said.

    House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania confirmed they’ve reached a “framework for moving forward” but did not provide details.

    Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, leaving McCarthy’s office, said they have a path forward now but said there will be no votes in the House tonight, as they had previously planned.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Tesla smashed it last quarter but China’s BYD did even better | CNN Business

    Tesla smashed it last quarter but China’s BYD did even better | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    BYD outpaced Tesla in the second quarter as the Chinese carmaker posted record sales of hybrid and electric vehicles.

    Between April and June, BYD

    (BYDDF)     sold more than 700,000 vehicles, almost double the number sold in the same quarter last year and setting a new quarterly record.

    On Sunday, Tesla

    (TSLA)     announced it had achieved its best quarterly results. The company produced nearly 480,000 vehicles and delivered over 466,000.

    In June, BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett, sold a total of 253,046 new energy vehicles, up 89% from a year ago, according to a company filing released Sunday. It was the best monthly sales it has ever achieved. New energy vehicles include both battery powered EVs and plug-in hybrids.

    Tesla and BYD are among the bestselling EV makers in the world. BYD still lags behind Tesla globally in terms of pure EV sales. But in China, the Shenzhen-based company has raced ahead as the top brand.

    In May, BYD sold around 119,000 pure EVs, more than double from the same period last year.

    In comparison, Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory delivered 77,695 vehicles in May, up 142% from a year ago, according to the most recent statistics released by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Twitter threatens to sue Meta after rival app Threads gains traction | CNN Business

    Twitter threatens to sue Meta after rival app Threads gains traction | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Twitter is threatening Meta with a lawsuit after the blockbuster launch of Meta’s new Twitter rival, Threads — in perhaps the clearest sign yet that Twitter views the app as a competitive threat.

    On Wednesday, an attorney representing Twitter sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter that accused the company of trade secret theft through the hiring of former Twitter employees.

    The letter was first reported by Semafor. A person familiar with the matter confirmed the letter’s authenticity to CNN.

    The letter by Alex Spiro, an outside lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk, alleged that Meta had engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

    In response to reports on the letter, Musk tweeted: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

    The letter goes on to say that Meta hired former Twitter employees who “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices” and that Meta “deliberately” involved these employees in developing Threads.

    “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights,” Spiro continued, “and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”

    Meta spokesperson Andy Stone flatly dismissed the letter. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” he said on Threads.

    In the months since Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, the social network has been challenged by a growing number of smaller microblogging platforms, such as the decentralized social network Mastodon and Bluesky, an alternative backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. But Twitter has not threatened either with litigation.

    Unlike some Twitter rivals, Threads has experienced rapid growth, with Zuckerberg reporting 30 million user sign-ups in the app’s first day. As of Thursday afternoon, Threads was the number-one free app on the iOS App Store.

    The legal threat may not necessarily lead to litigation but it could be part of a strategy to slow down Meta, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

    “Sometimes lawyers, they threaten but don’t follow through. Or they see how far they can go. That may be the case, but I don’t know that for sure,” Tobias told CNN. He added: “There may be some value to tying it up in litigation and complicating life for Meta.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • US gives ‘green light’ to European countries to train Ukrainians on F-16 fighter jets, Biden official says | CNN Politics

    US gives ‘green light’ to European countries to train Ukrainians on F-16 fighter jets, Biden official says | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The US will allow European countries to train Ukrainians on F-16 fighter jets, a top Biden administration official confirmed Sunday, a potential boon for Ukraine’s efforts to counter Russia’s air superiority.

    “The president has given a green light and we will allow, permit, support, facilitate and in fact provide the necessary tools for Ukrainians to begin being trained on F-16s, as soon as the Europeans are prepared,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    The decision cements a stark turnaround for President Joe Biden, who said earlier this year that he did not believe that Ukraine needed the F-16s. One of the main issues Kyiv’s ground forces have faced as their counteroffensive gets underway is Russian air power holding them back. Russia still maintains air superiority, which makes it difficult for ground forces to advance.

    In May, Biden had informed G7 leaders that the US would support a joint effort with allies and partners to train Ukrainian pilots on fourth generation aircraft, including F-16s, though it was unclear at the time when that training would star.

    The US-made jet has air-to-air refueling capabilities and is compatible with most NATO weapons already being supplied to Ukraine. Despite first entering production in the 1980s, it has gone through several upgrades, making it more advanced and versatile that any jet Ukraine currently has in its fleet, and a fierce rival for most Russian aircraft, with the exception of newer models that Moscow has hesitated to deploy in Ukraine.

    Sullivan noted Sunday that European allies have said they need several weeks to prepare training abilities and that the US would meet whatever timeline they set out.

    “The United States will not be the hold-up in ensuring that this F-16 training can get underway,” he said.

    Turning to US national defense, Sullivan lamented the House-passed defense policy bill that includes the adoption of several controversial amendments that touched on hot-button social issues.

    “This legislation is never getting to the president’s desk because what you’ve seen from an extreme group of Republicans is to put forward a set of amendments that try to mix domestic social debates with the needs the security needs,” Sullivan said.

    The addition of amendments pushed by conservative hard-liners related to abortion policy and transgender health care access as well as targeting diversity and inclusion programs infuriated Democrats – and will now set up a clash with the Democratic-controlled Senate.

    Pressed to acknowledge that the bill was passed along party lines but supported by a majority of House GOP lawmakers, Sullivan argued that the process had been hijacked by a, “small group of Republicans.”

    “A huge number of folks in the House, including Republicans, in my view, are not particularly interested in having politics come into the middle of the (National) Defense Authorization Act,” Sullivan said, referring to the official name of the defense policy bill.

    “So it was a small group of Republicans who essentially created a trap. A circumstance we don’t need to find ourselves in.”

    CLARIFICATION: This story and headline have been updated to better describe the Ukrainian F-16 trainees.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • ‘It almost doubled our workload’: AI is supposed to make jobs easier. These workers disagree | CNN Business

    ‘It almost doubled our workload’: AI is supposed to make jobs easier. These workers disagree | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A new crop of artificial intelligence tools carries the promise of streamlining tasks, improving efficiency and boosting productivity in the workplace. But that hasn’t been Neil Clarke’s experience so far.

    Clarke, an editor and publisher, said he recently had to temporarily shutter the online submission form for his science fiction and fantasy magazine, Clarkesworld, after his team was inundated with a deluge of “consistently bad” AI-generated submissions.

    “They’re some of the worst stories we’ve seen, actually,” Clarke said of the hundreds of pieces of AI-produced content he and his team of humans now must manually parse through. “But it’s more of the problem of volume, not quality. The quantity is burying us.”

    “It almost doubled our workload,” he added, describing the latest AI tools as “a thorn in our side for the last few months.” Clarke said that he anticipates his team is going to have to close submissions again. “It’s going to reach a point where we can’t handle it.”

    Since ChatGPT launched late last year, many of the tech world’s most prominent figures have waxed poetic about how AI has the potential to boost productivity, help us all work less and create new and better jobs in the future. “In the next few years, the main impact of AI on work will be to help people do their jobs more efficiently,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in a blog post recently.

    But as is often the case with tech, the long-term impact isn’t always clear or the same across industries and markets. Moreover, the road to a techno-utopia is often bumpy and plagued with unintended consequences, whether it’s lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT or a small publication buried under an avalanche of computer-generated submissions.

    Big Tech companies are now rushing to jump on the AI bandwagon, pledging significant investments into new AI-powered tools that promise to streamline work. These tools can help people quickly draft emails, make presentations and summarize large datasets or texts.

    In a recent study, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that access to ChatGPT increased productivity for workers who were assigned tasks like writing cover letters, “delicate” emails and cost-benefit analyses. “I think what our study shows is that this kind of technology has important applications in white collar work. It’s a useful technology. But it’s still too early to tell if it will be good or bad, or how exactly it’s going to cause society to adjust,” Shakked Noy, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Economics, who co-authored the paper, said in a statement.

    Mathias Cormann, the secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently said the intergovernmental organization has found that AI can improve some aspects of job quality, but there are tradeoffs.

    “Workers do report, though, that the intensity of their work has increased after the adoption of AI in their workplaces,” Cormann said in public remarks, pointing to the findings of a report released by the organization. The report also found that for non-AI specialists and non-managers, the use of AI had only a “minimal impact on wages so far” – meaning that for the average employee, the work is scaling up, but the pay isn’t.

    Ivana Saula, the research director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said that workers in her union have said they feel like “guinea pigs” as employers rush to roll out AI-powered tools on the job.

    And it hasn’t always gone smoothly, Saula said. The implementation of these new tech tools has often led to more “residual tasks that a human still needs to do.” This can include picking up additional logistics tasks that a machine simply can’t do, Saula said, adding more time and pressure to a daily work flow.

    The union represents a broad range of workers, including in air transportation, health care, public service, manufacturing and the nuclear industry, Saula said.

    “It’s never just clean cut, where the machine can entirely replace the human,” Saula told CNN. “It can replace certain aspects of what a worker does, but there’s some tasks that are outstanding that get placed on whoever remains.”

    Workers are also “saying that my workload is heavier” after the implementation of new AI tools, Saula said, and “the intensity at which I work is much faster because now it’s being set by the machine.” She added that the feedback they are getting from workers shows how important it is to “actually involve workers in the process of implementation.”

    “Because there’s knowledge on the ground, on the frontlines, that employers need to be aware of,” she said. “And oftentimes, I think there’s disconnects between frontline workers and what happens on shop floors, and upper management, and not to mention CEOs.”

    Perhaps nowhere are the pros and cons of AI for businesses as apparent as in the media industry. These tools offer the promise of accelerating if not automating copywriting, advertising and certain editorial work, but there have already been some notable blunders.

    News outlet CNET had to issue “substantial” corrections earlier this year after experimenting with using an AI tool to write stories. And what was supposed to be a simple AI-written story on Star Wars published by Gizmodo earlier this month similarly required a correction and resulted in employee turmoil. But both outlets have signaled they will still move forward with using the technology to assist in newsrooms.

    Others like Clarke, the publisher, have tried to combat the fallout from the rise of AI by relying on more AI. Clarke said he and his team turned to AI-powered detectors of AI-generated work to deal with the deluge of submissions but found these tools weren’t helpful because of how unreliably they flag “false positives and false negatives,” especially for writers whose second language is English.

    “You listen to these AI experts, they go on about how these things are going to do amazing breakthroughs in different fields,” Clarke said. “But those aren’t the fields they’re currently working in.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Google is building an AI tool for journalists | CNN Business

    Google is building an AI tool for journalists | CNN Business

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Google is developing an artificial intelligence tool for news publishers that can generate article text and headlines, the company said, highlighting how the technology may soon transform the journalism industry.

    The tech giant said in a statement that it is looking to partner with news outlets on the AI tool’s use in newsrooms.

    “Our goal is to give journalists the choice of using these emerging technologies in a way that enhances their work and productivity,” a Google spokesperson said, “just like we’re making assistive tools available for people in Gmail and in Google Docs.”

    The effort was first reported by The New York Times, which said the project is referred to internally as “Genesis” and has been pitched to The Times, The Washington Post and News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal.

    Google’s statement did not name those media companies but said the company is particularly focusing on “smaller publishers.” It added that the project is not aimed at replacing journalists nor their “essential role … in reporting, creating, and fact-checking their articles.”

    The new tool comes as tech companies, including Google, race to develop and deploy a new crop of generative AI features into applications used in the workplace, with the promise of streamlining tasks and making employees more productive.

    But these tools, which are trained on information online, have also raised concerns because of their potential to get facts wrong or “hallucinate” responses.

    News outlet CNET had to issue “substantial” corrections earlier this year after experimenting with using an AI tool to write stories. And what was supposed to be a simple AI-written story on “Star Wars” published by Gizmodo earlier this month similarly required a correction. But both outlets have said they will still move forward with using the technology.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Uber’s post-pandemic growth is slowing | CNN Business

    Uber’s post-pandemic growth is slowing | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Uber has reported that its revenue ticked up 14% last quarter, marking a slower pace of growth than recent quarters when sales surged as riders returned to pre-pandemic habits.

    The company on Tuesday reported revenue of $9.2 billion for the quarter ending in June, a 14% increase from the same period last year, just missing Wall Street’s estimates. The number of trips customers took were up 22% in the quarter.

    The company reported its first-ever unadjusted operating profit of $326 million. It also posted record quarterly free cash flow of $1.1 billion.

    “For most of our history, ‘profitable’ wasn’t the first thing that came up when you ask someone about Uber,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on a call with analysts Tuesday morning. “But we knew they were wrong about Uber, as did many of our investors who backed us over the years.”

    Uber also said gross bookings (the amount paid by customers) surged 16% year over year to $33.6 billion. Trips during the quarter grew 22% to 2.3 billion, or approximately 25 million trips per day on average.

    On the call, the chief executive touted “a new all-time high of $15.1 billion in total earnings for drivers and couriers on the platform” that was seen last quarter.

    Uber also announced Tuesday that Chief Financial Officer Nelson Chai will leave the company next January, and a search for his replacement is underway.

    “Nelson has been a huge part of Uber’s transformation over the past five years,” Khosrowshahi said on the analysts’ call. “I know that I speak for the entire company that we’re grateful for everything he’s done to establish such a strong foundation for a path forward.”

    Shares for Uber climbed by some 4% in pre-market trading Tuesday morning as the company offered rosy guidance. Uber stock has roughly doubled since the start of the year.

    In a note Tuesday morning, William Blair analyst Ralph Schackart touted how the strong results this past quarter were “driven by continued execution, robust engagement, and record audience levels using the platform.”

    “Uber continues to drive incremental profitability, demonstrating its ability to efficiently run the broader business and drive positive results,” Schackart added.

    Uber has so far navigated its pandemic recovery far better than its chief rival, Lyft. Lyft is set to report quarterly earnings next week on Tuesday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Fixing Social Security involves hard choices | CNN Politics

    Fixing Social Security involves hard choices | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    There’s a reason why politicians have long shied away from addressing Social Security’s massive financial problems. The commonly proposed solutions involve cutting benefits or raising taxes, which would spark an outcry from a range of powerful constituents, including senior citizens and the business community.

    The situation, however, is only growing more critical. The combined Social Security trust funds are projected to run dry in 2034, according to the latest annual report from the entitlement program’s trustees that was released last week. At that time, the funds’ reserves will be depleted, and the program’s continuing income will only cover 80% of benefits owed.

    The estimate is one year earlier than the trustees projected last year.

    About 66 million Americans received Social Security benefits in 2022. It’s a vital lifeline for many of them. Some 42% of elderly women and 37% of elderly men rely on the monthly payments for at least half their income, according to the Social Security Administration.

    Though congressional Republicans’ drive to cut spending amid debt ceiling negotiations this year has prompted renewed interest in the entitlement’s finances, little is likely to happen, experts say. The insolvency date is still too far in the future.

    The last time Congress enacted a major overhaul, in 1983, Social Security was only months away from being able to pay full benefits. At that time, Democratic lawmakers who controlled the House agreed with Senate Republicans and then-GOP President Ronald Reagan to increase payroll taxes and gradually raise the full retirement age from 65 to 67, among other reforms.

    While President Joe Biden has promised to strengthen Social Security and defend it from any cuts by Republicans, he has yet to lay out a concrete vision for protecting the program. It was not included in his annual budget proposal this year, though he did suggest a financial fix for Medicare, which is facing its own solvency issues.

    Asked about the president’s plan, the White House said that the budget “clearly states his principles for strengthening Social Security.”

    “He looks forward to working with Congress to responsibly strengthen Social Security by ensuring that high-income individuals pay their fair share, without increasing taxes on anyone making less than $400,000,” said Robyn Patterson, assistant press secretary at the White House.

    A multitude of proposals have been floated over the years to address Social Security’s shortfall, many of which have multiple measures.

    Several options focus on saving the entitlement program money, though left-leaning advocates and senior citizen groups are quick to point out that these moves are actually benefit cuts that they would strenuously oppose.

    One common proposal is raising the retirement age. Currently, Americans can start collecting Social Security benefits at 62, though doing so would reduce their lifetime payments by as much as 30%.

    The full retirement age, which had been 65 for much of the program’s existence, is slowly rising to 67 for Americans born in 1960 or later.

    Some policymakers advocate for raising the full retirement age to 70 for future retirees, bringing it more in line with changes in life expectancy. That would mean those retiring earlier than that would get smaller monthly checks than under current law.

    Doing so could wipe out about a third of the Social Security trust fund’s 75-year deficit.

    Last year, the conservative Republican Study Committee released a budget plan that called for raising the full retirement age for future retirees at a rate of three months per year until it is increased to 70 for those born in 1978. It would then link the retirement age to future increases in life expectancy, as well as adjust the number of working years included in benefit calculations to 40 years, up from 35 years.

    Other options include reducing benefits for higher-income Americans, which was also included in the Republican Study Committee’s budget plan.

    New retirees’ Social Security benefits are one-third higher today than they were for folks who retired 20 years ago, even after accounting for inflation, according to Andrew Biggs, senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Plus, the maximum Social Security benefit in the US is two to three times higher than the maximum retirement benefit in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

    Biggs supports placing a cap on the maximum benefit that the highest-earning retirees can receive. The maximum benefit this year is about $43,000 and will rise to $59,000 by 2050, he said. Though such a cap would only solve about 10% to 15% of the long-term solvency gap, Biggs argues it’s one step, and it only affects those who he says don’t depend on the benefits.

    “We’re going way, way beyond a pure safety net program,” Biggs said at a recent webinar hosted by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a government watchdog group. “Here we’re looking at a retirement program for middle income and upper income people.”

    Other suggestions that have been floated include changing the formulas that determine the benefits Americans get upon retirement or the annual cost-of-living adjustment retirees receive to slow the growth of payments.

    The main way to bring more money into the Social Security system is to increase the amount of payroll taxes collected.

    A proposal popular among Democrats and left-leaning experts is to lift the wage cap so that higher-income earners have to shell out more in payroll taxes.

    The Social Security tax rate of 6.2% is levied on both employers and employees, for a total rate of 12.4%. However, in 2023, it’s only applied to annual wages of up to $160,200. (By contrast, Medicare’s 2.9% total payroll tax rate is applied to all wages, and higher-income Americans are subject to an additional 0.9% Medicare tax.)

    When payroll taxes for Social Security were first collected in 1937, about 92% of earnings from jobs covered by the program were subject to the payroll tax, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By 2020, that figure had fallen to about 83% as income inequality has increased.

    Several congressional Democrats have floated proposals to raise the amount of wages subject to the payroll tax. Rep. John Larson of Connecticut wants to apply the payroll tax to wages above $400,000, which he says would extend the program’s solvency by nine years.

    Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, introduced a bill earlier this year that would make multiple changes to Social Security, including subjecting all income above $250,000 to the payroll tax and applying it to investment and business income. They say their reforms would extend the entitlement’s solvency for 75 years.

    But changing the wage cap could also alter the fundamental design of Social Security, in which retirees’ benefits are tied to the amount of taxes they paid into the system while working.

    For instance, the proposal from Sanders and Warren would not credit the additional taxed earnings toward benefits. That would increase the beneficial impact on solvency but would also raise resistance among some advocates who believe the link between taxes and benefits should be maintained.

    Another option is raising the payroll tax rate. Increasing it to a total of 16% would just about assure 75 years of solvency, said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

    Most lawmakers, however, would not find that type of tax hike very palatable, particularly not Republicans who control the House.

    While experts disagree on the best way to address Social Security’s shortfall, one thing they are generally united on is that waiting will only result in having to employ harsher solutions. But that isn’t spurring elected officials to action.

    “Nobody’s acting as if that’s something they’ve got to take seriously,” Biggs said. “So I’ll just be honest and say I’m worried about how this thing plays out.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Justice Department asks Supreme Court to intervene in abortion drug ruling | CNN Politics

    Justice Department asks Supreme Court to intervene in abortion drug ruling | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court Friday to intervene in an emergency dispute over a Texas judge’s medication abortion drug ruling, requesting that the court step in now rather than wait for an appeal to formally play out at the federal appellate level.

    The case is the most important abortion-related dispute to reach the high court since the justices overturned Roe v. Wade last term. It centers on the scope of the US Food and Drug Administration’s authority to regulate a drug that is used in the majority of abortions today in states that still allow the procedure.

    Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said in the filing that it “concerns unprecedented lower court orders countermanding FDA’s scientific judgment and unleashing regulatory chaos by suspending the existing FDA-approved conditions of use for mifepristone.”

    She said that if the ruling were allowed to stand it would “inflict grave harm on women, the medical system, the agency, and the public.”

    Danco, a manufacturer of the drug, also asked the justices to step in on an emergency basis before Friday, with an attorney for the company saying in its filing that leaving the lower court opinion in play will “irreparably harm Danco, which will be unable to both conduct its business nationwide and comply with its legal obligations under the FDCA nationwide.”

    “The lack of emergency relief from this Court will also harm women, the healthcare system, the pharmaceutical industry, States’ sovereignty interests, and the separation-of-powers,” the attonrey, Jessica L. Ellsworth, told the justices.

    The clock is ticking. If the Supreme Court does not step in, the district court’s ruling, as amended by a subsequent appeals court opinion, will go into effect at midnight CT, and access to the drug, Mifepristone, will be restricted while the appeals process plays out.

    Both the government and Danco are asking the court to freeze the lower court opinion, or alternatively, agree to take up the case themselves and hear arguments before the summer recess, a very expedited time frame.

    The controversy began when US District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued a broad ruling that blocks the FDA’s 2000 approval of the drug, as well as changes the FDA made in subsequent years to make the drug more accessible.

    Late Wednesday, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals froze part of the ruling. The court said the drug, that was approved in 2000, could stay on the market, but agreed with Kacsmaryk that access could be limited.

    The appeals court ordered a return to the stricter, pre-2016 FDA regime around the drug, which prevents mailing the pill to patients who obtained it through telehealth, or virtual visits with their providers rather than traveling to a clinic or hospital to obtain the drug in person.

    The restrictions also affect the instructions on the label for the medication, shortening the window of obtaining the pill to seven weeks into pregnancy as opposed to 10. It’s possible however that even with the ruling in effect, some providers could go “off-label” and continue to prescribe mifepristone up until 10 weeks. Mifepristone is one of the drugs used for an abortion via medication as opposed to surgery.

    Prelogar, the solicitor general, argued in her filing to the Supreme Court that the FDA’s expert judgment should not be challenged.

    “FDA has maintained that scientific judgment across five presidential administrations, and it has modified the original conditions of mifepristone’s approval as decades of experience have conclusively demonstrated the drug’s safety,” she wrote, reminding the justices that currently, “more than half of women in this country who choose to terminate their pregnancies rely on mifrepristone to do so.”

    She highlighted a key threshold issue in the case, arguing that the doctors opposed to abortion who are behind the suit do not have the legal right to be in court. That is because, she said, they neither “take nor prescribe” the drug, and the FDA’s approval “does not require them to do or refrain from doing anything.”

    CNN Supreme Court analyst Steve Vladeck, who is a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said the 5th Circuit’s ruling “froze the craziest, most harmful parts of Kacsmaryk’s ruling,” but that access to mifepristone is still significantly limited.

    “The panel ruled that the challenge to the 2000 approval of mifepristone itself is likely time-barred, so it froze that part of the ruling,” he wrote on Twitter. “But it *didn’t* freeze Kacsmaryk’s block of the 2016 and 2021 revisions that (1) make mifepristone available up to 10 weeks; and (2) by mail.”

    Medication abortion has emerged a particularly heated flashpoint in the abortion legal battle since the Supreme Court last year overturned the Roe v. Wade precedent that protected abortion rights nationally.

    In November, anti-abortion doctors and plaintiffs brought the lawsuit challenging the FDA’s 2000 approval of the drug and targeting how the agency has since changed the rules around its use in ways that have made the pill easier to obtain.

    A split 5th Circuit panel said in its order that it was reinstating the approval of the drug because of certain procedural obstacles the plaintiffs face in challenging it. But the appeals court said that the abortion pill’s defenders had not shown that they were likely to succeed in defeating the plaintiffs’ claims against the FDA’s more recent regulatory actions toward mifepristone.

    The appellate order was handed down by Circuit Judges Catharina Haynes, a George W. Bush nominee, and Kurt Engelhardt and Andrew Oldham, both Donald Trump nominees. Haynes, however, did not sign on to some aspects of the order.

    The FDA approved mifepristone after a four-year review process. It has shown to be a safe and effective way to terminate a pregnancy in the two-plus decades it’s been on the market. But anti-abortion doctors and medical associations allege that the agency ran afoul of the law by not adequately taking into account the drug’s supposed risks.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Here’s what you can do if you lose Medicaid coverage | CNN Politics

    Here’s what you can do if you lose Medicaid coverage | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Though millions of Americans are expected to be kicked off of Medicaid in coming months, they don’t all have to be left uninsured.

    But it could take some work to regain health coverage.

    “For a lot of people, this can be a very disruptive period of time,” said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “There is a significant time and paperwork burden being placed on families – a lot of them very low income, a lot of them medically vulnerable.”

    States are now free to terminate the Medicaid coverage of residents they deem ineligible. States had been barred from involuntarily removing anyone for the past three years as part of an early congressional Covid-19 pandemic relief package, causing enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program to balloon to more than 92 million people.

    Of the roughly 15 million people who could lose Medicaid coverage over the next 14 months, about 8.2 million would no longer qualify, according to a Department of Health and Human Services analysis released in August.

    Some 2.7 million of these folks would qualify for enhanced federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies that could bring their monthly premiums to as low as $0.

    Another 5 million are expected to secure other coverage, mainly through employers.

    Some 6.8 million people, however, will be disenrolled even though they remain eligible for Medicaid.

    Check out Obamacare policies: Folks who lose their Medicaid coverage can shop for health insurance plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

    Those whose annual incomes remain below 150% of the federal poverty level – $20,385 for a single person and $41,625 for a family of four in 2023 – can obtain enhanced federal assistance to lower their premiums to as little as $0 a month. That beefed-up subsidy is in place through 2025.

    Many people with higher incomes can find subsidized policies for $10 or less.

    State Medicaid agencies are tasked with easing residents’ transfer from Medicaid to the Obamacare marketplaces, but the smoothness of the process will vary greatly by state. Once someone is determined to no longer qualify for Medicaid, the agency must assess his or her eligibility for Affordable Care Act coverage and transfer the resident’s information to the exchange.

    Some states that run their own Obamacare exchanges are taking extra steps to ensure their residents remain covered. Rhode Island, for instance, is automatically enrolling certain people in marketplace coverage. It’s also paying the first two months of premiums for some residents who actively select policies.

    Those who lose Medicaid coverage and live in the 33 states covered by the federal marketplace, healthcare.gov, can apply for Affordable Care Act policies through a special enrollment period that runs through July 2024. State-based exchanges have their own deadlines, with some mirroring the federal exchange and others providing much shorter windows.

    Navigators and insurance brokers can help consumers select plans.

    Historically, very few people who lose Medicaid coverage wind up in Obamacare plans. About 4% of adults who were terminated from Medicaid enrolled in exchange policies in 2018, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.

    The coverage differs too. Those that switch to the marketplace may have to find other doctors that are in their insurers’ networks and may face out-of-pocket costs.

    Consider job-based coverage: A number of people who are terminated from Medicaid may already be covered by their employers, particularly those who started new jobs during the pandemic. Others have the option of obtaining coverage through work, though it will almost certainly be more expensive than Medicaid since it will likely entail premiums, deductibles and copays.

    Workers may find they can afford coverage for themselves but not for their families. If the premiums for family policies cost more than 9.12% of household income, spouses and children may be able to get subsidized coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

    Employees should contact their human resources departments to sign up. Typically, they’ll have to enroll within 60 days of losing Medicaid, but those who are terminated from the program between now and July 10 will have until early September to sign up.

    See if you or your children remain eligible for Medicaid: Millions of Americans who still qualify for Medicaid may lose coverage for procedural reasons. For example, they may have moved so they don’t receive the redetermination notices. Or they may not return the necessary paperwork to prove their eligibility.

    So it’s crucial that folks update their contact information with their state agencies and reply to the letters they receive about renewing their Medicaid eligibility.

    “When you get that packet in the mail, respond to it promptly,” Corlette said.

    Those who are dropped have 90 days to submit their renewal paperwork to their state agency, which is required to reinstate them if they are found eligible. Beyond that time period, people may reapply. In most states, your coverage can be made retroactive for up to three months if you were eligible and received Medicaid-covered services.

    Parents who no longer qualify and are terminated should check if their children remain eligible. As many as 6.7 million kids are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage, according to Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families.

    Nearly three-quarters of the children projected to be dropped will remain eligible for Medicaid or CHIP but will lose coverage mainly because of administrative issues. Black and Latino children and families are more likely to be erroneously terminated, according to the center.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Gaming the government is not going well | CNN Politics

    Gaming the government is not going well | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]

    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    Governing is not, or at least it shouldn’t be, some kind of game.

    But this week it feels like powerful people are treating it like one, running trick plays to score points, trash talking and making threats, and exploiting rules to bring things to a halt.

    In Florida, a brewing grudge match pits Disney, one of the state’s largest employers, against its governor, the ambitious Republican Ron DeSantis who is eyeing a presidential run.

    How the state government’s relationship with its notable corporate citizen turned petty is getting hard to follow.

    The basic storyline, as laid out by CNN’s Steve Contorno, is that Disney spoke out against a law DeSantis pushed to limit what teachers can say in the classroom. Faulting its “woke” corporate behavior, DeSantis and Republicans in the state moved to install their political allies onto a quasi-government board that oversees the area that includes Disney World. But the company moved to defang the board before the new appointees took on their roles.

    Rather than sending a message to Disney, DeSantis now looks outmaneuvered and is threatening more action against the company.

    It’s not clear if he’s serious or not, but the most bizarre idea he suggested is building a state prison on public land next to the Magic Kingdom. Watch him here.

    The appearance of a Republican potentially trying to sabotage a massive employer is the kind of play DeSantis’ potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination are happy to point out.

    “I think it rightfully makes a lot of people question his judgment and his maturity,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Tuesday in a conversation with the website Semafor.

    Christie said if DeSantis “can’t see around a corner that (Disney CEO) Bob Iger created for you,” then “that’s not the guy I want sitting across from President Xi and negotiating our next agreement with China.”

    In Washington, where the Senate rulebook has been befuddling people for centuries, Republicans are citing the Senate rules and making clear they won’t let Democrats replace, even temporarily, the ailing Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    Feinstein, 89, has been out of the office since early March while dealing with a case of the shingles. But since Democrats only have a one-seat majority on the panel, her absence has ground judicial nominations to a halt.

    For a rules-minded guy like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, another octogenarian just returning from his own month-plus convalescence after a fall, there’s no need to let Democrats get another vote on the committee and push through scores of nominations caught in limbo. McConnell suggested if Democrats culled the herd of nominees, they might get some confirmed.

    “They could move a number of less controversial nominees right now. Right now,” he said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “They want to sideline Senator Feinstein, so they can ram through the worst four as well.”

    Various Senate rules have been confusing people for centuries. Even if Feinstein were to resign, Sen. Mitt Romney suggested Tuesday that Republicans could block changes to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    “I don’t think Republicans are going to lift a finger in any way to get more liberal judges appointed, so whether she’s resigned or leaves temporarily from the judiciary committee, I think we will slow walk any process that makes it easier to appoint more liberal judges,” Romney said.

    Feinstein’s absence isn’t the only problem, as CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Lauren Fox have pointed out, since Republican senators can also use the “blue slip” tradition to veto judicial nominees the Biden administration has put forward for their states.

    If the importance of judicial nominees is still in question, look no further than the furor that a Trump-appointed federal judge has caused by ruling to suspend the 23-year-old FDA authorization for mifepristone, the first drug used in a medication abortion.

    The decision by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk out of the federal court in Amarillo, Texas, has sent the abortion issue straight back to the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule by Wednesday in a case that could remove nationwide access to a medication that American women have been using for decades, even in states that have sought to protect abortion rights.

    Kacsmaryk was all but selected by opponents of the drug to hear the case since he is the only federal district judge in Amarillo.

    It’s not the rulebook, but rather the teamwork making House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s life difficult. He wanted to send a message of unity to Wall Street with a speech there Monday. His goal was to calm nerves about the looming debt ceiling showdown and project that Republicans have a plan to raise the debt ceiling and impose spending cuts. Their plan probably won’t get any support from Democrats.

    But almost on cue Tuesday, conservative Republicans began to poke holes in McCarthy’s plan, calling it into question as the US hurtles toward a potential default if there is no debt ceiling agreement by June. McCarthy, at least for now, seems disinclined to allow a vote on any proposal that could get support from Democrats in the House. And he seems unable to find a proposal that can get all Republicans on board. Those Senate rules make it impossible for anything to pass through that chamber without support from ten Republicans, so long as Feinstein is not voting. Read more from CNN’s Stephen Collinson.

    Suffice it to say the debt ceiling, the abortion medication and Disney’s status in Florida are issues where there’s not a winner and a loser, even if they’re being treated that way by the powerful people who are supposed to be in charge.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • ‘He’s lost that old twinkle:’ When a young Joe Biden criticized his opponent’s age | CNN Politics

    ‘He’s lost that old twinkle:’ When a young Joe Biden criticized his opponent’s age | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden, who at 80 has had to confront questions about his age and mental acuity as he is poised to launch a reelection campaign for president, once ran a campaign that sharply attacked his opponent’s age.

    In 1972, Biden, then 29 years old and a local Delaware councilman, was running against incumbent Republican Sen. Cale Boggs who was 63 years old, a former two term governor and the state’s senior senator.

    “Cale doesn’t want to run, he’s lost that old twinkle in his eye he used to have,” Biden said of Boggs, who had originally wanted to retire but was persuaded to run for reelection.

    Biden used his opponent’s age against him in a way that was so explicit, one local reporter dubbed his approach, “Dear old dad.”

    Biden was running to become one of the youngest people ever elected to the United States Senate. Now, the president is already the oldest person ever to serve in the office of the presidency, and, if reelected, would leave office at the age of 86. That would best the next oldest president by more than 9 years if he served a full second term.

    The president’s age has been “omnipresent” in nearly every conversation, CNN reported in February, though that notion was disputed by a White House spokesperson.

    In response to a request for comment, White House spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN that Biden has made “historic progress” that has been “enthusiastically welcomed by younger Americans – including his unprecedented investments in fighting climate change, his first-of-its kind police reform executive order, his actions to support community policing and decriminalize marijuana, and getting more Americans health coverage than ever before.”

    In 1972, advertisements for Biden in local newspapers and on the radio hammered home a line, “he understands what’s happening today.” The ads targeted Boggs’ age by bringing up past historical topics from Bogg’s “generation,” like Joseph Stalin ruling Russia, jazz musicians using heroin, the development of the polio vaccine, and taxes from the 1940s.

    “Cale Boggs’ generation dreamed of conquering polio, Joe Biden’s generation dreams of conquering heroin,” read one newspaper ad. “To Cale Boggs an unfair tax was the 1948 poll tax. To Joe Biden an unfair tax is the 1972 income tax,” read another.

    One radio advertisement targeted Boggs as too focused on past threats from Russia, while ignoring domestic issues like crime.

    “One of the biggest differences between Cale Boggs and Joe Biden is the things they worry about,” said the radio ad. “In Cale Boggs’ day when Stalin ruled, Americans had visions of the Russian soldiers in our streets. In Joe Biden’s day, Americans have visions of American criminals in our streets. Joe Biden, he understands what’s happening today.”

    The approach drew pushback from Sen. William Roth, a Delaware Republican who Biden would work closely with for the next 30 years, according to the News Journal, and commentary from the media at the time.

    Biden eventually won that race with the Associated Press declaring, “Biden stressed age to defeat Boggs.”

    As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Norm Lockman wrote, “The new campaign strategy, ordered by Biden himself, eases off the strident tub-thumping and finger pointing and uses an approach that says, in effect, “Dear old dad may have been right for his time – and I love him – but things are different now.’”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • TikTok is testing a new option to create AI-generated avatars for profile pictures | CNN Business

    TikTok is testing a new option to create AI-generated avatars for profile pictures | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    TikTok is testing a new option to let users create AI-generated avatars for their profile pictures, the company confirmed to CNN on Wednesday, in a move with the potential to put recent advances in artificial intelligence technology front and center for millions of users.

    The new feature appears to create a stylized, illustrated image of the user based on an uploaded picture, according to a post from social media consultant Matt Navarra, who was first to spot the option.

    The feature is still in the early stages of testing and not widely available to TikTok users, according to the company, and there is currently no timeline for when the feature might roll out.

    “We’re always thinking about new ways to add value to the community and enrich the TikTok experience, as we continue to build a safe place that entertains, inspires creativity, and drives culture,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN. “In a few select regions, we’re experimenting with a new way to create and share profile pictures with the TikTok community.”

    AI-generated images have taken over the internet in recent months, but some tools have also raised concerns among privacy experts, digital artists, and users who have noticed the potential to sexualize images, make skin paler and make bodies thinner.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • AI pioneer quits Google to warn about the technology’s ‘dangers’ | CNN Business

    AI pioneer quits Google to warn about the technology’s ‘dangers’ | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called the ‘Godfather of AI,’ confirmed Monday that he left his role at Google last week to speak out about the “dangers” of the technology he helped to develop.

    Hinton’s pioneering work on neural networks shaped artificial intelligence systems powering many of today’s products. He worked part-time at Google for a decade on the tech giant’s AI development efforts, but he has since come to have concerns about the technology and his role in advancing it.

    “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told the New York Times, which was first to report his decision.

    In a tweet Monday, Hinton said he left Google so he could speak freely about the risks of AI, rather than because of a desire to criticize Google specifically.

    “I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google,” Hinton said in a tweet. “Google has acted very responsibly.”

    Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google, said Hinton “has made foundational breakthroughs in AI” and expressed appreciation for Hinton’s “decade of contributions at Google.”

    “We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI,” Dean said in a statement provided to CNN. “We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”

    Hinton’s decision to step back from the company and speak out on the technology comes as a growing number of lawmakers, advocacy groups and tech insiders have raised alarms about the potential for a new crop of AI-powered chatbots to spread misinformation and displace jobs.

    The wave of attention around ChatGPT late last year helped renew an arms race among tech companies to develop and deploy similar AI tools in their products. OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are at the forefront of this trend, but IBM, Amazon, Baidu and Tencent are working on similar technologies.

    In March, some prominent figures in tech signed a letter calling for artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” The letter, published by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit backed by Elon Musk,came just two weeks after OpenAI announced GPT-4, an even more powerful version of the technology that powers ChatGPT. In early tests and a company demo, GPT-4 was used to draft lawsuits, pass standardized exams and build a working website from a hand-drawn sketch.

    In the interview with the Times, Hinton echoed concerns about AI’s potential to eliminate jobs and create a world where many will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” He also pointed to the stunning pace of advancement, far beyond what he and others had anticipated.

    “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” Hinton said in the interview. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

    Even before stepping aside from Google, Hinton had spoken publicly about AI’s potential to do harm as well as good.

    “I believe that the rapid progress of AI is going to transform society in ways we do not fully understand and not all of the effects are going to be good,” Hinton said in a 2021 commencement address at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai. He noted how AI will boost healthcare while also creating opportunities for lethal autonomous weapons. “I find this prospect much more immediate and much more terrifying than the prospect of robots taking over, which I think is a very long way off.”

    Hinton isn’t the first Google employee to raise a red flag on AI. In July, the company fired an engineer who claimed an unreleased AI system had become sentient, saying he violated employment and data security policies. Many in the AI community pushed back strongly on the engineer’s assertion.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Three GOP appointees, including 2 from Trump, will hear the next phase of major abortion pill case | CNN Politics

    Three GOP appointees, including 2 from Trump, will hear the next phase of major abortion pill case | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The New Orleans-based appeals court panel that will oversee the next stage in the blockbuster legal challenge to the availability of medication abortion drugs is made up of three Republican appointees, including one Trump nominee who has called abortion a “moral tragedy.”

    Circuit Judges James Ho and Cory Wilson, both Trump nominees, will hear the oral arguments on May 17, alongside Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, an appointee of George W. Bush.

    The lawsuit was brought by anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations who allege the US Food and Drug Administration broke the law when it approved the medication abortion drug mifepristone more than two decades ago.

    Last month, US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk agreed with their arguments and ruled that the approval of the drug should be suspended. 

    However, his ruling was put on hold by the Supreme Court on April 21 and it will remain on hold until the case goes back to the high court, regardless of how the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals rules on the merits.

    Ho, a former Texas solicitor general, is considered one of the most conservative and strident members of the 5th Circuit, having described abortion as a “moral tragedy” in a 2018 concurring opinion.

    In a 2019 concurring opinion, Ho also said that a trial judge’s ruling – which struck down a 15-week abortion ban and which was affirmed by the 5th Circuit under the then-standing Roe precedent – displayed “an alarming disrespect for the millions of Americans who believe that babies deserve legal protection during pregnancy as well as after birth, and that abortion is the immoral, tragic, and violent taking of innocent human life.”

    The 5th Circuit is considered one of the most conservative in the country has consistently ruled against the Biden Justice Department.

    Wilson earlier this year wrote a majority circuit opinion that said that a federal law that bars gun ownership by people under domestic violence was unconstitutional.

    Elrod penned an opinion last month that struck down the federal ban on bump stocks, which are attachments that essentially allow shooters to fire semiautomatic rifles continuously with one pull of the trigger.

    The medication abortion case is another hugely consequential case to go through the circuit. Mifepristone – the drug being targeted in the lawsuit – is the first pill in the two-pill regimen for terminating a pregnancy. Medication abortion makes up more than half of all abortions obtained in the United States.

    In filings last week, the Justice Department told the 5th Circuit that Kacsmaryk’s conclusions that the drug was unsafe rested “on a series of fundamental errors.”

    “While FDA justified its scientific conclusions in multiple detailed reviews, including a medical review spanning more than 100 pages and assessing dozens of studies and other scientific information, the district court swept the agency’s judgments aside by substituting its own lay understanding of purportedly contrary studies, offering demonstrably erroneous characterizations of the record,” the DOJ’s filing said. 

    The department’s opponents in the case will file a response later on Monday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Montana governor bans TikTok | CNN Business

    Montana governor bans TikTok | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a bill Wednesday banning TikTok in the state.

    Gianforte tweeted that he has banned TikTok in Montana “to protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party,” officially making it the first state to ban the social media application.

    The controversial law marks the furthest step yet by a state government to restrict TikTok over perceived security concerns and comes as some federal lawmakers have called for a national ban of TikTok. But it is expected to be challenged in court.

    The bill, which will take effect in January, specifically names TikTok as its target, prohibiting the app from operating within state lines. The law also outlines potential fines of $10,000 per day for violators, including app stores found to host the social media application.

    Last month, lawmakers in Montana’s House of Representatives voted 54-43 to pass the bill, known as SB419, sending it to Gianforte’s desk.

    In a statement to CNN, TikTok said it would push to defend the rights of users in Montana.

    “Governor Gianforte has signed a bill that infringes on the First Amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok, a platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of people across the state. We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living, and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.”

    The law comes as TikTok faces growing criticism for its ties to China. TikTok is owned by China-based ByteDance. Many US officials have expressed fears that the Chinese government could potentially access US data via TikTok for spying purposes, though there is so far no evidence that the Chinese government has ever accessed personal information of US-based TikTok users.

    NetChoice, a technology trade group that includes TikTok as a member, called the Montana bill unconstitutional.

    “The government may not block our ability to access constitutionally protected speech – whether it is in a newspaper, on a website or via an app. In implementing this law, Montana ignores the U.S. Constitution, due process and free speech by denying access to a website and apps their citizens want to use,” said Carl Szabo, NetChoice’s general counsel.

    The ACLU also pushed back on the bill, releasing a statement saying that “with this ban, Governor Gianforte and the Montana legislature have trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information, and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment.”

    On Wednesday, Gianforte signed an additional bill that prohibits the use of any social media application “tied to foreign adversaries” on government devices, including ByteDance-owned CapCut and Lemon8, and Telegram Messenger, which was founded in Russia.

    [ad_2]

    Source link