Social media under the Senate microscope

TikTok, Snap, and YouTube face an angry Senate panel; Israel announces plans to build 3,000 homes in the occupied West Bank. 

Tonight's Sentences was written by Ellen Ioanes.

Senate panel: TikTok, Snap, YouTube hurt kids

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

• On Tuesday, leaders from TikTok, Snap, and YouTube sat before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security to answer questions regarding the safety of their products for the young audiences they attract. It was the first time TikTok and Snap had been asked to give Senate testimony. [Washington Post / Rachel Lerman and Cristiano Lima]
• Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Thune (R-SD) and others on the panel asked executives from the three platforms how they were moderating content that could be harmful to young users, including sexually explicit images and videos, and videos promoting drug use. “TikTok’s algorithm can push young users into content glorifying eating disorders, drugs, violence,” Klobuchar told the panel, and asked the executives, “Have you stopped that?” [WSJ / Ryan Tracy]
• Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) pressed the representatives of each company about whether they would support proposed changes to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which would ban these companies from collecting user data from 13- to 15-year-olds unless they had clear consent, and would allow teens and parents to more easily delete teens’ personal information. TikTok’s Michael Beckerman said the company supports those measures, but Snap and YouTube wouldn’t say if they did. [TechCrunch / Taylor Hatmaker]
• The panel’s top Republican, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, expressed concern that TikTok — owned by Chinese company ByteDance — might share user data with the Chinese government. [Reuters / Diane Bartz and Sheila Dang]
• TikTok and Snap tried to argue that since they’re different from Facebook — Snapchat sets disappearing messages, TikTok is an entertainment platform — they’re somehow less culpable in the harm social media can cause. “Being different from Facebook is not a defense,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) fired back. [The Hill / Maggie Miller, Chris Mills Rodrigo, and Rebecca Klar]
• The companies promised more transparency, vowing to release research, independent studies, and data about their products and their effects on young people. Those guarantees come on the heels of the leak of a tranche of damning documents on Facebook’s business practices, which seemingly ignore user well-being if it cuts into company profits. [The Verge / Makena Kelly]

Israel announces plans to build 3,000 settler homes in occupied West Bank

• The Israeli Defense Ministry’s higher planning council authorized the construction of more than 3,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday. The US has long maintained that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not legitimate, and the Biden administration has expressed its outrage to Israel’s government. [ABC / Ilan ben Zion and Laurie Kellman]
• “Transferring Israeli civilians to settlements in the occupied West Bank is a war crime and comes at the expense of Palestinians who lose their land, are subject to attacks from settlers and lose their freedom of movement, due to travel restrictions that carve out Israeli-only areas,” Sari Bashi, special adviser to the Program Office at Human Rights Watch, told Vox in an email Wednesday. “Israeli settlement expansion also furthers an official Israeli policy to dominate Palestinians, one of the elements of the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
• Settlements like those approved Wednesday also break up contiguous Palestinian land, making political unification difficult and obstructing the potential for a future Palestinian state, in addition to being considered illegal by much of the international community. [NYT / Patrick Kingsley]
• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken objected to the settlements in a phone call with Defense Minister Benny Gantz on Tuesday. The announcement comes the same week that the Israeli government designated six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations, which also sparked a strong rebuke from the State Department. [Axios / Barak Ravid]

The US has issued its first passport with an “X” gender marker, paving the way for more widespread adoption of the practice next year. [AP / Colleen Slevin]

• Meanwhile, in Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has signed a law preventing trans girls from participating in girls’ sports in public schools, effective January 18. [Washington Post / Mariana Alfaro]
• Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, the leader of the G9 coalition of street gangs in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, demanded Prime Minister Ariel Henry step down as a fuel crisis sends the country further into chaos. [Reuters / Brian Ellsworth and Gessika Thomas]
• Merck announced Wednesday that it will share the formula for its Covid-19 pill molnupiravir with 105 low-income countries where wealthy countries have so far failed to donate enough vaccine doses to minimize the spread of the virus. [NYT / Stephanie Nolen]

“They may open schools, but indirectly they are trying to destroy women’s education.”

[Shakila, the mother of two teenage girls, on the news that the Taliban had reopened some schools for girls in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan]

Sean Illing talks with Joe Bernstein of BuzzFeed News about online disinformation and what — if anything — can be done about it. [Spotify]

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