The UK Online Safety Act, which goals to manage the web, has been amended to remove a controversial but critical measure.
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Days after Congress passed a bipartisan spending bill banning TikTok from government devices, lawmakers and advocates say they need to further regulate social media firms within the New Year.
TikTok, a video sharing app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, attracts greater than a billion users every month. Lawmakers and FBI director Christopher Wray have raised concerns that TikTok’s ownership structure could put U.S. user data in danger, as China-based firms could also be legally obligated handy over details about users.
TikTok has repeatedly said that its US user data just isn’t in China, although these assurances have done little to assuage concerns.
Representative Mike Gallagher of R-Wisc. compared TikTok to “digital fentanyl” on Sunday, telling NBC’s Meet the Press that he believed the ban on the app ought to be prolonged nationwide.
“It’s very addictive and destructive,” he said. “We’re seeing worrying data in regards to the disruptive impact of constant social media use, especially on young men and girls here in America.”
Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen said on Sunday that because social media platforms similar to TikTok, Twitter and YouTube operate using similar algorithms, the addition of regulators should seek greater transparency of their operation in the primary place.
Haugen said she thinks most individuals do not realize how far behind the US is in relation to social media regulation.
“It’s like we’re back in 1965, we do not have seat belt laws yet,” she told NBC’s Meet the Press.
Congress has didn’t pass a lot of essentially the most aggressive laws targeting technology in 2022, including antitrust laws that might require app stores developed by Apple and Google to offer developers more payment options, and a measure mandating recent protective barriers to guard children online. Congress has made more progress this yr than previously toward a compromise bill on national privacy standardsbut all that is still is a patchwork of state laws on tips on how to protect consumer data.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn, said there was bipartisan support for a lot of these bills, and plenty of of them ended up within the Senate. But she said the tech lobby is so powerful that bills with “strong, bipartisan support” could collapse “inside 24 hours.”
Klobuchar said on Sunday that things will only change with social media firms when Americans resolve they’ve had enough.
“We’re behind,” she told NBC’s Meet the Press. “It’s time for 2023, let it’s our resolution to finally pass considered one of these laws.”
