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  • Trump Set to Meet With Top Aides to Decide TikTok’s Fate

    Trump Set to Meet With Top Aides to Decide TikTok’s Fate


    President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials on Wednesday to discuss a proposal that could secure TikTok’s future in the United States, two people familiar with the plans said.

    Mr. Trump will consider a proposal for a new ownership structure for the popular video app, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance. Lawmakers and other U.S. officials have argued that the app’s ties to China raise national security concerns, and a federal law that was passed last year requires TikTok to change its ownership or face a ban in the United States. The latest deadline for that ban is Saturday.

    The meeting is set to include Vice President JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump tapped to find an arrangement to save the popular app early in February, and other top officials, the two people said on the condition of anonymity. The new ownership structure, they said, could include Blackstone, the private equity giant, and Oracle, the technology company.

    The meeting is another twist in the long national saga of TikTok, which surged in popularity in the United States despite sustained and deep scrutiny in Washington and state capitals. Mr. Trump, who made repeated assurances that he wants to save the app, extended the deadline for a deal in January and suggested that he might do so again if a suitable plan was not reached by early this month.

    TikTok did not immediately return a request for comment.

    It is not clear that the kind of deal under discussion would comply with the law, which calls for no more than 20 percent of TikTok or its parent company to be owned by people or companies in so-called foreign adversary countries, a list that includes China.

    The law also bars a new entity from working with ByteDance to operate its video-recommendation technology or creating a data-sharing agreement.

    Mr. Trump suggested last week that he might relax upcoming tariffs on China in exchange for the country’s support of a deal.

    TikTok has maintained that it is not for sale, in part, it says, because the Chinese government would block a deal.



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  • Spotify Sells Itself to Advertisers as an Alternative to ‘Doom Scrolling’

    Spotify Sells Itself to Advertisers as an Alternative to ‘Doom Scrolling’


    Time passes in funny ways when you’re on your phone.

    Five minutes of swiping on TikTok or tapping through Instagram Stories can slip into 10 minutes, or 20, or one sunken hour. Alex Norstrom, co-president and chief business officer of Spotify, believes some apps will soon “self-swipe,” requiring even less of your effort or awareness.

    His company is moving in a different direction: Using Spotify, he said, “takes commitment.”

    On Wednesday, Spotify laid out its plans to boost its advertising business with several new initiatives to make ad-buying easier, including an A.I. tool for brands in the United States and Canada to generate their scripts and voice-overs.

    But it also made a broader pitch to potential advertisers: Many Spotify users aren’t passively scrolling.

    They’re learning the somewhat fussy technical process of joining a “jam” (listening to music simultaneously with friends), Mr. Norstrom said; or getting to know the host of a podcast who already has 2,000 episodes; or pressing play on a 48-hour audiobook. And a more engaged audience is more likely to engage with ads.

    “It’s more nutritious,” Mr. Norstrom said in an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, “rather than these high-caloric, quick things.”

    On Wednesday, Lee Brown, global head of advertising, further promoted Spotify to advertisers as an alternative to “rotting and doom scrolling.”

    “People just feel good when they’re on Spotify,” Mr. Brown said in his remarks. “How many apps can say that?”

    Spotify’s emphasis on engaged users came during its first “advance” event — a presentation held for advertisers before the upfronts and NewFronts season, where traditional and online media companies compete for brands’ attention. While most of Spotify’s revenue is generated through subscriptions, its advertising business has been growing more incrementally.

    The goal of media companies during this season is to set themselves apart. Digital media has always been a chaotic landscape, but mounting recession concerns beget even more uncertainty; while TikTok awaits its fate and X becomes a political megaphone, the unexpected rise of video podcasting has propelled YouTube to new heights.

    Spotify enters this season on a stronger footing: 2024 was the first full year of profitability for the company, with a net income of about $1.2 billion and a high of 675 million monthly active users, including 263 million paid subscribers.

    The core focus of the company, founded in 2006 in Stockholm, remains music: You can listen for free with ads, or pay a monthly fee to listen without ads. But Spotify’s expansion into podcasts a decade ago brought new highs and lows, particularly as the advertising market around podcasting wavered.

    Two years ago, the company — long focused on developing new products — turned to improve its bottom line. In 2023, that resulted in three rounds of high-profile layoffs, affecting a reported 2,300 employees, along with a re-evaluation of office space.

    Although Spotify has tried to push into video, its advertisers are still attracted to audio as a “soundtrack,” said Paulie Dery, chief marketing officer at AG1, or Athletic Greens. A ubiquitous supplement advertiser on podcasts, AG1 sells “morning health” products, and wants to capture people during their morning routines, while exercising or commuting.

    As for notching another year of profitability, there have been reports of Spotify’s developing a new subscription tier for music superfans, with better audio quality and access to concert tickets. (Mr. Norstrom said he saw “great potential” in new tiers, but declined to confirm any rollout details.)

    The company is also focused on improving its recommendation algorithm across content types, Mr. Norstrom said — for example, giving users more personalized suggestions for audiobooks based on their favorite music and podcasts.

    The goal is more varied consumption, which inevitably means users who sink more hours into Spotify. But when it’s nutritional, “you tend to come out of it feeling better,” Mr. Norstrom said.



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  • With TikTok Deadline Looming, Details of a Potential Deal Emerge

    With TikTok Deadline Looming, Details of a Potential Deal Emerge


    Two days before a deadline for TikTok to be sold to a non-Chinese company or otherwise face a ban in the United States, a deal has not yet been cemented but the contours of one are starting to take shape.

    Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday that the administration would announce a plan for TikTok by Saturday. A federal law passed last year to resolve national security concerns related to TikTok and its Chinese owner, ByteDance, called for the app to be sold or banned in January. President Trump delayed the enforcement of that law until April 5.

    Mr. Trump also met with top officials at the White House on Wednesday to consider a proposal for TikTok’s future. On Thursday, he told reporters that his administration was “very close to a deal with a very good group of people,” and would consider using TikTok as a negotiating chip with China on tariffs.

    While TikTok has enjoyed interest from potential buyers including Amazon, the Trump administration is eyeing a deal that would sidestep a sale of the entire company, according to four people familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The plan would be to spin out TikTok into a new company and bring on new American investors to reduce the ownership stakes of Chinese investors.

    The private-equity giant Blackstone and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are considering investments, they said. Two of the people suggested that the private equity firm Silver Lake was also considering an investment. Current investors, like Susquehanna and General Atlantic, would retain a stake in TikTok, and Oracle, which processes and serves TikTok user data, would likely maintain at least an operational role in managing TikTok’s data, three of the people said.

    The down-to-the-wire negotiations are nothing new for TikTok, which has repeatedly wriggled out of earlier scrutiny in the United States. The app has cemented its role as a cultural juggernaut in the country, where it has more than 170 million users.

    TikTok and Silver Lake didn’t respond to a request for comment. Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.

    A White House spokesperson said any announcement on TikTok would come from Mr. Trump and declined to comment on the details.

    Many aspects of the deal under consideration remain murky. It’s not clear what will happen to TikTok’s coveted algorithm. Two people suggested that the new entity could license the algorithm from ByteDance. Under the law, a new TikTok entity cannot cooperate with ByteDance “with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm” or for data sharing.

    “Congress said that for national security purposes, there has to be an operational severing between China, this new entity and the algorithm,” said Jim Secreto, a former counselor for investment security at the Treasury Department, who helped shape the Biden administration’s policy on TikTok.

    TikTok, which spent most of the last year trying and failing to defeat the law in courts, has maintained that it is not for sale, in part because the Chinese government would block a transaction. The Chinese government’s latest stance on TikTok is unclear.

    “We have a situation with TikTok where China will probably say, ‘We’ll approve a deal, but will you do something on the tariffs?’ The tariffs give us great power to negotiate,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday. He clarified that he was not in active talks with China on TikTok and tariffs.

    Questions over the deal’s legal uncertainty have prompted some of the firms interested in investing in TikTok to look for indemnification for their investments, one of the people said.

    Congress, which passed the TikTok law in a rare bipartisan vote, may not support the deal Mr. Trump is eyeing.

    Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said on Wednesday that he was skeptical of a deal that kept control of the app’s video recommendation algorithm inside China.

    “If you can get a deal to actually sell the company and it meets the terms that the statute sets out, that’s fantastic; that’s great,” he said. “But if not, then I think you’ve got to enforce the statute and ban TikTok. This middle way, I don’t think is viable.”

    David McCabe and Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.



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  • How Geo Group’s Surveillance Tech Is Aiding Trump’s Immigration Agenda

    How Geo Group’s Surveillance Tech Is Aiding Trump’s Immigration Agenda


    Follow live updates on the Trump administration.

    After a Honduran immigrant arrived in the United States in 2022, officials ordered him to use a government-issued app as part of an immigration surveillance program.

    At least once a week, the immigrant, a former police officer in Honduras who was living in Louisiana, would take a selfie through the facial-recognition powered app to confirm his identity and location. By trading some of his privacy, he avoided being put in a detention center and obtained a work permit.

    In February, he received a message: report to an immigration office so the tracking technology could be updated. When he arrived, federal agents were waiting. They handcuffed him and put him on a vehicle bound for a detention center, where he has been ever since, according to an account from his wife and Jacinta González, the head of programs for the advocacy group MediaJustice who is working with the detained immigrant. He and his wife declined to be named for fear of harming his legal proceedings.

    The maker of the app he had used was Geo Group, the largest private prison operator in the United States. Over the past decade, the company has also built a lucrative side business of digital tools — including ankle monitors, smart watches and tracking apps — to surveil immigrants on behalf of the federal government.

    Those products are now aiding President Trump’s deportation efforts by providing the whereabouts of unauthorized immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to legal aid groups and immigration organizations. No figures have been released about the number of arrests made from the digital monitoring program, but legal aid groups estimated it was at least in the hundreds. More than 30,000 immigrants were arrested in Mr. Trump’s first 50 days in office, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

    “These are the people who are precisely being monitored,” said Laura Rodriguez, a lawyer with American Friends Service Committee, a legal aid organization in New Jersey with several clients in the monitoring program who were detained. “It’s just easy pickings.”

    The use of Geo Group’s technology has made the company one of the Trump administration’s big business winners so far. Even as Mr. Trump slashes costs across the federal government, his agencies have handed Geo Group new federal contracts to house unauthorized immigrants. And D.H.S. is weighing the renewal of a longtime contract with the company — worth about $350 million last year — to track the roughly 180,000 people now in the surveillance program.

    Republican lawmakers and administration advisers have also called for more surveillance of immigrants, including expanded location tracking and stricter enforcement of curfews.

    Mr. Trump’s immigration policies have sent Geo Group’s stock price soaring and kept its share price afloat even as the stock market gyrates. While digital monitoring generates only about 14 percent of its $2.4 billion in annual revenue, the company, which is based in Boca Raton, Fla., has said its immigrant surveillance could more than double. Profit margins on the monitoring business hover at around 50 percent.

    “The Geo Group was built for this unique moment in our country’s history and the opportunities that it will bring,” George Zoley, the company’s founder, said on an investor call days after Mr. Trump was elected.

    The tracking program that Geo Group oversees, called Alternatives to Detention, was set up to keep tabs on unauthorized immigrants who face potential deportation. Rather than being placed in detention centers or released into the country without supervision, immigrants receive location tracking devices. They must quickly respond to alerts sent to the gadgets in order to confirm their whereabouts, or risk punishment.

    The program highlights technology’s growing role in guarding borders, with demand for muscular digital tools opening lucrative avenues for private industry while expanding government authority. The boom has benefited companies like Palantir, Anduril and Cellebrite, which have won government contracts.

    Supporters praised the effectiveness and cost savings of Geo Group’s tools, but critics warned that the technology usage might lead to deeper surveillance of immigrant communities.

    “The government bills it as an alternative to detention,” but “we see it as an expansion to detention,” said Noor Zafar, a senior lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

    At the same time, Geo Group’s products have been glitchy and expensive, according to more than a dozen current and former employees and government officials, as well as a review of the company’s federal contract and other records.

    Each time an immigrant sends a selfie to check in through the company’s SmartLink app, which can happen millions of times a year, the federal government pays roughly $1, according to portions of Geo Group’s government contract obtained by The New York Times. The company charges $3 a day for any immigrant wearing its VeriWatch smartwatch. If the watch is lost, Geo Group bills the government $380, more than the cost of an Apple Watch SE.

    ICE said in a statement that the monitoring program “effectively increases court appearance rates and compliance with release conditions.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

    Attempts to modify the program and open the contract to rival bids have been stymied by Geo Group’s lobbying and connections on Capitol Hill and within ICE, according to senior D.H.S. officials and congressional staff members. Some senior ICE employees have gone on to work at the company.

    Geo Group referred questions about how its monitoring technology is being used by the Trump administration to ICE. In a statement, Geo Group said it had “never advocated for or against, nor have we ever played a role in setting immigration enforcement policies.” The company added that its services are “closely monitored in accordance with strict government contract standards.”

    Mr. Zoley, whose family moved to the United States from Greece when he was a child, started Geo Group in 1984 as a division of a security guard business. When the prison population exploded in the 1980s, the company expanded into running private prisons. It now has about 100 facilities.

    In 1986, Geo Group won an ICE contract to build an immigrant processing facility in Aurora, Colo., to hold up to 150 people. By the 2000s, immigration had become a major business, which fluctuated based on who was in the White House and which party controlled Congress.

    To diversify, Geo Group turned to digital surveillance. In 2011, the firm paid $415 million for Behavioral Interventions, a Colorado company founded in the 1970s to track cattle and which had expanded to monitoring parolees. Behavioral Interventions had an exclusive contract with ICE to digitally monitor thousands of recently arrived immigrants.

    Mr. Zoley called the acquisition “transformative.” He was proved right when the government plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into remote surveillance of immigrants over the next decade, especially during the Biden administration.

    The idea was that remote surveillance of immigrants facing removal proceedings would reduce the burdens on already-packed detention centers, relieve ICE officers of grunt work and save money. Digitally monitoring an immigrant costs about $4.20 a day, versus about $150 a day in a detention center, according to ICE.

    “The program is meant to make sure we know who these people are and that they are on an adequate level of supervision,” said Deborah Fleischaker, the ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration.

    By 2022, more than 300,000 immigrants were enrolled in the program. Geo Group’s sales soared, but revenue fell in 2023.

    The company lobbied to expand the surveillance, said Jason Morín, a political science professor at California State University, Northridge who studies Geo Group. Ahead of the 2024 election, a Geo Group subsidiary gave more than $2 million in campaign contributions to Republican candidates, with the bulk going to groups supporting Mr. Trump and those running for Congress, according to Federal Election Commission records.

    Wall Street analysts included Geo Group, which has about 18,000 employees, in ideas for stocks that would perform well if Mr. Trump were elected. With no real competition, some estimated the company’s digital monitoring business would generate nearly $700 million in revenue cumulatively through 2026. Its biggest shareholders include BlackRock and Vanguard.

    For many unauthorized immigrants who are not detained at the border, the perilous journey to the United States ends inside Geo Group’s surveillance system.

    After turning themselves in to immigration officers, they are given an ankle bracelet, a smartwatch or a smartphone with the company’s monitoring app. Rather than be overseen by ICE officers, they are watched by Geo Group case specialists.

    Under the program, immigrants live more freely in the United States during a legal process that can play out over years. The trade-off is constant monitoring. Geo Group’s app has permission to continuously track a user’s location, according to a Times analysis of its code.

    One Geo Group case worker in the Northeast, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, described using a Google Maps-like software to check immigrants’ locations. If immigrants were not home or lied about their whereabouts during a check-in, they received a strike. If an immigrant received three strikes, the case specialist would inform an ICE agent, who could increase monitoring, detain the person or expedite the person’s deportation.

    Geo Group employees at field offices from Massachusetts to Alabama said they had often struggled to monitor up to 300 immigrants simultaneously. The case worker in the Northeast recalled being asked to make 12 home visits to immigrants in a single day. Each was limited to five minutes, despite requirements to do a full report on the immigrant’s living conditions, she said. Geo Group charged D.H.S. up to $88 a visit.

    Those under surveillance are limited in where they can travel, lawyers and immigration rights groups said. If immigrants leave a set area of where they can be, the software alerts case officers. Because many check-ins must happen from home on a prescribed day — say on a Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — people are often stuck waiting, affecting their ability to work or perform certain day-to-day tasks.

    “Whatever radius is imposed, that becomes the size of their life,” said Laura Rivera, a senior lawyer for Just Futures Law, which focuses on tech usage for immigration enforcement.

    Geo Group stores data collected from the surveillance program on its private servers, making it more cumbersome for the government to access and analyze, current and former ICE officials said. Former company employees described technical problems, such as relying on outdated servers that frequently crashed, weak batteries in the company’s smartwatches and a bug in which the app occasionally failed to tell an immigrant to check in, which could result in a penalty.

    In 2022, as Geo Group’s digital monitoring business ballooned, some Biden administration officials in the Department of Homeland Security questioned the cost and effectiveness of the tracking program.

    The D.H.S. officials met to draft a plan to change it, including standards for assessing each immigrant’s risk of committing a crime or fleeing and what surveillance that merited, said six people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations. The officials wanted to break up the contract into three parts to solicit new bids, the people said. Around the same time, D.H.S. tech workers were asked to develop cheaper alternatives to Geo Group.

    ​The moves threatened Geo Group’s involvement in the monitoring program, with major financial implications for its bottom line. The company began lobbying to disrupt the plans, according to agency officials and Capitol Hill staff members.

    Conservatives and some career ICE officials joined in. Thomas D. Homan, who was then working for a conservative immigration group and is now Mr. Trump’s border czar, wrote a Breitbart editorial attacking the plans and the midlevel Biden administration official responsible for them. A conservative group created a website dedicated to attacking the official.

    Daniel Bible, ICE’s head of enforcement and removal operations at the time, also stalled the changes by ordering lengthy reviews and delaying approvals, two people said. Last year, he joined Geo Group as an executive. He did not respond to a message for comment.

    The efforts eventually died and plans to develop cheaper alternatives to Geo Group’s tech never went beyond testing.

    Geo Group said allegations that it had blocked changes to the surveillance program “are part of a politicized effort by open borders groups to interfere with the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts and to abolish immigration enforcement writ large.”

    Since Mr. Trump took office, fewer immigrants have crossed the border as the president has signed legislation like the Laken Riley Act, which mandates increasing detentions of immigrants with criminal histories in facilities like those owned by Geo Group.

    The new law could also require “significant ramp-up in the electronic monitoring,” Mr. Zoley said on an earnings call in February, adding that his company was ready to scale up its surveillance “by several hundreds of thousands and upward to several millions of participants as required.”

    Geo Group’s technology has repeatedly helped ICE officers carry out deportations, legal aid groups said. In January, ICE agents in Georgia tracked an immigrant to a job site and detained him, while another was grabbed outside a church, the groups said. More recently, an immigrant in New Jersey received a call from a Geo Group employee asking him to step outside his home because the tracker was not getting a signal. Agents were waiting for him.

    Legal aid groups said they feared that the surveillance would soon be used for larger raids. In 2019, during the first Trump administration, agents in Mississippi used data harvested from Geo Group’s tools to help secure a warrant for a raid on a chicken processing plant. The ensuing sweep, which included workplaces across the state, led to the detention of 680 immigrants.

    Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.



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  • Trump Extends TikTok Deal Deadline, Delaying a Potential Ban

    Trump Extends TikTok Deal Deadline, Delaying a Potential Ban


    President Trump on Friday granted TikTok another reprieve by announcing that he would extend the deadline for when the popular app had to make a deal to be separated from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States.

    TikTok, which had been facing a Saturday deadline for a deal, now has another 75 days to find a new owner to comply with a federal law that requires it to change its structure to resolve national security concerns. That puts the new deadline for a deal in mid-June.

    The delay was President Trump’s second for TikTok this year. He first paused enforcement of the law in January, even after it was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court.

    “The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Friday, adding that “we do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’” He added that he looked forward to “working with TikTok and China” to close the deal and suggested he would consider using the app as a negotiating chip with China on tariffs.

    Mr. Trump’s latest action highlights the intractable nature of the dilemma with TikTok, which has endured years of scrutiny in the United States over its Chinese ties. Even as lawmakers and U.S. officials repeatedly raised questions about whether TikTok was secure, the app cemented its role as a cultural juggernaut, with more than 170 million users in the country who use it to make memes and share videos.

    The extension is happening at a particularly fraught time in U.S.-China relations. This week, Mr. Trump levied a 34 percent tariff on goods from China. On Friday, Beijing retaliated with 34 percent across-the-board tariffs on imports from the United States. Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested he could lower the China tariffs as part of a deal for the app, which will need the Chinese government’s approval.

    The delay also renewed questions about Mr. Trump’s willingness to put his presidential power ahead of the rule of law. The federal law that aimed to change TikTok’s ownership or have the app be banned was passed last year with wide bipartisan support and took effect in January after the Supreme Court ruling. But Mr. Trump effectively overrode the law when he paused enforcement of it that month.

    For now, one thing is certain: TikTok will continue to operate in the United States for the foreseeable future. In January, the app briefly went dark around the time the federal law took effect, before flickering back to life.

    ByteDance on Friday acknowledged for the first time that it has been involved in the TikTok negotiations with the U.S. government.

    “There are key matters to be resolved,” a spokesperson for ByteDance said in an email. “Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law.”

    The delay followed tense, last-minute negotiations and a flurry of interest from potential buyers. The law calls for no more than 20 percent of TikTok or its parent company to be owned by people or corporations in so-called foreign adversary countries, a list that includes China. To achieve that, ByteDance could sell TikTok or bring on new investors to reduce the proportion of Chinese investors, among other options.

    Vice President JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump tapped to help oversee the deal talks, said as recently as Thursday that a deal was imminent. Though Amazon submitted a bid to buy the entire company, much of the speculation in recent weeks centered on an option in which existing U.S. investors in ByteDance would roll over their stakes into a new independent global TikTok company, and additional U.S. investors would be brought on. The private equity firms Blackstone and Silver Lake had weighed taking a stake in TikTok, as had the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

    It isn’t clear whether that kind of arrangement would satisfy the law, or the policymakers who pushed for it.

    Some were especially concerned about what might happen to TikTok’s coveted algorithm, which figures out what users like and populates a customized feed for them. Under the law, a new TikTok entity cannot cooperate with ByteDance “with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm” or for data sharing.

    “If this ends up with a deal where the algorithm stays in Beijing, then the whole thing’s a scam, the whole thing’s a fraud,” Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said on Friday. “The law is explicitly clear.”

    A group of Republican lawmakers on two House committees — one focused on China and competition and the other on energy and commerce — said in a statement Friday that “any resolution must ensure that U.S. law is followed, and that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to American user data or the ability to manipulate the content consumed by Americans.”

    “We remain committed to enforcing the framework established by Congress to safeguard the American people,” said the group, which included Representative John Moolenaar, Republican of Michigan, who chairs the committee on China.

    The concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership have been brewing for years. Intelligence officials and lawmakers have argued that ByteDance could hand over sensitive U.S. user data to Beijing, like location information, based on laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations. They have also claimed that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations to fuel misinformation, a concern that escalated in the United States after the start of the Israel-Hamas war and during the presidential election.

    TikTok has long pushed back on Washington’s concerns and sought to address them without a sale. It has said it has never misused data or spread propaganda at the behest of Beijing in the United States. But despite a multibillion dollar security effort that sought to give the American government unique oversight of TikTok’s operations, the company could not win the trust of Washington.

    Lindsay Gorman, the managing director of the technology program at the German Marshall Fund and a technology adviser under the Biden administration, said the Trump administration’s support for the app was a win for China.

    “That is the purest victory out there — that a democratic country that’s supposed to be a nation of laws is declining to enforce it on pressure from a foreign government and its corporate intermediaries,” she said.

    The law bars technology companies from distributing or updating TikTok under the threat of serious financial penalties. Apple and Google removed TikTok from their app stores for nearly a month until they received assurances from the Justice Department that they would not face fines for carrying TikTok in the stores.

    Lawmakers have suggested that those companies could face shareholder lawsuits in the future, if they continue to distribute and host TikTok in the United States under the current administration.

    Akamai Technologies, a Massachusetts-based company that helps deliver TikTok videos to phones, recently updated the risk factors in its annual filing to note that, “even though President Trump has extended the enforcement deadline for a ban on the Chinese application, there is no assurance that we will not be exposed to liability.”

    David McCabe contributed reporting from Washington.



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  • How Trump’s TikTok Negotiations Were Upended by China and Tariffs

    How Trump’s TikTok Negotiations Were Upended by China and Tariffs


    Last Wednesday, the Trump administration believed it had a plan to save TikTok.

    ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, along with some of its U.S. investors, and officials in Washington had coalesced around a new ownership structure for the popular video app, four people familiar with the situation said. That structure, the people said, would help TikTok satisfy the terms of a federal law that required the app to find a new owner in order to address national security concerns, or face a ban in the United States.

    Under the plan, new investors would own 50 percent of a new American TikTok entity, while Chinese owners would retain less than 20 percent, the limit specified by the law, two of the people said. ByteDance told the White House that Beijing was comfortable with the general structure, two of the people said.

    By Thursday morning, a version of a draft executive order from President Trump that outlined the broad strokes of the deal was circulating, according to a copy that was viewed by The New York Times.

    Then the plan hit a wall. ByteDance called the White House with the news: Now that Mr. Trump had announced a slew of tariffs on Chinese imports, the Chinese government would not let the TikTok deal proceed, two of the people said.

    In response, Mr. Trump bought the app more time. On Friday, he paused enforcement of the federal law, extending the deadline for a TikTok deal into mid-June.

    “The report is that we had a deal, pretty much, for TikTok, not a deal but pretty close, and then China changed the deal because of tariffs,” Mr. Trump told reporters Sunday aboard Air Force One.

    The standstill highlights how the video app is mired in a geopolitical tussle between the United States and China over trade and tech supremacy. It also illuminates China’s power over TikTok’s future in the United States, raising questions about whether a deal for TikTok will ever get done.

    “The parties are too proud to negotiate, and so we’re stuck between two colossal economies that are butting heads against each other,” said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University who has publicly opposed the law targeting TikTok. “TikTok has kind of been the mouse that got caught underfoot between these two elephants.”

    The Chinese Embassy in Washington, TikTok and ByteDance didn’t respond to requests for comment. The White House referred The Times to Mr. Trump’s post on Truth Social announcing his extension for the debate over the app.

    The administration and ByteDance had been hammering out a structure that would allow TikTok’s biggest U.S. investors, including the firms General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group, to hold on to their investments while government officials brought in new funds to dilute the app’s Chinese ownership.

    The tentative terms of the deal said new investors would own 50 percent of a new American TikTok entity. Current investors would own 30 percent and Chinese owners less than 20 percent, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Private equity giants like Blackstone and Silver Lake, along with the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, had weighed taking a stake in the new entity.

    The proposal was laid out in a lengthy and detailed document for investors, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

    Two people involved in the deal said there was more work to do. Certain potential new investors viewed any deal as conditional, subject to the due diligence that accompanies any large transaction, they said.

    China was always, to some extent, the wild card. The administration’s lead negotiators were not discussing the issue directly with the Chinese government, instead relying on ByteDance’s understanding of Beijing’s position, two people familiar with the matter said. Before the president’s announcement on tariffs last week, ByteDance believed that the Chinese government was comfortable with the structure coming together in Washington, the people said. But even before the tariff announcement, there was no guarantee that Beijing would provide its informal blessing or formal approval.

    The talks about TikTok are likely to become even more complicated as a trade war between the two countries escalates. China initiated retaliatory tariffs after Mr. Trump’s announcement, prompting the president to warn on Monday that he would impose additional tariffs of 50 percent on the country if it persisted.

    Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he would consider lowering tariffs on China in exchange for its approval of a TikTok deal.

    Leveraging tariffs for the negotiations is “really kind of a remarkable effort to coerce a sale of a foreign company,” Mr. Chander said.

    But the trade war may still be underway in June, he said, adding: “We may well find ourselves back in Groundhog Day 75 days from now unless the tariffs have been resolved.”

    TikTok has maintained for the better part of a year that it is not for sale.

    On Friday, ByteDance acknowledged for the first time that it had been involved in negotiations with the U.S. government over the app’s future — but said any decision was ultimately in another party’s hands.

    “There are key matters to be resolved,” a spokesperson for ByteDance told reporters in an email. “Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law.”

    Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.



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  • How Do the iPhone 16E and Google Pixel 9A Compare to More Expensive Models?

    How Do the iPhone 16E and Google Pixel 9A Compare to More Expensive Models?


    With all the talk about tariffs driving up costs, the word “cheaper” should bring comfort to just about anyone. That’s why I’m delighted to share that the cheaper smartphone from Google has arrived, a few months after Apple released a somewhat cheaper entry-level iPhone — and that both products are very good.

    Google this week released the Pixel 9a, the $500 sibling of its $800 flagship smartphone, the Pixel 9. It competes directly with the $600 iPhone 16e released in February, the cheaper version of Apple’s $800 iPhone 16.

    Both of the new phones have the staples that people care most about — great cameras, nice screens, zippy speeds, modern software and long battery life. To cut costs, they omit some fancier extras, like advanced camera features.

    Is it a wise idea to save some bucks, or better to spend more on the fancier phones? To find out, I strapped on a fanny pack and carried all four phones with me for the last week to run tests.

    The upshot: As is often the case, you get what you pay for. The $800 phones are slightly better in terms of features and performance than the cheaper versions, and the $600 iPhone is faster and has a better camera than the $500 Pixel.

    But more important, the cheaper Pixel and iPhone were nearly indistinguishable from their $800 counterparts in several of my tests. In some cases, like battery life, the cheaper phones were even better.

    The future of phone prices remains uncertain, but costs will probably go up. On Wednesday, when President Trump announced a pause on most “reciprocal” tariffs, he raised tariffs on China, where many phones are manufactured. So plenty of us may soon be motivated to compromise and consider less expensive alternatives.

    Apple declined to comment on whether it would increase prices of its iPhones, but analysts estimate that tariffs could drive up the cost of some iPhone 16 Pro models to anywhere from $1,300 to $2,300. Google said there were no planned changes to the $500 price for the Pixel 9a, but it declined to comment on whether it would amend the price of its $800 Pixel 9.

    The cheaper iPhone and Pixel look nearly identical to their more expensive siblings. Here’s a rundown of how they compare:

    • The screens on the phones are the same size. (The iPhones measure 6.1 diagonal inches, and the Pixels measure 6.3 diagonal inches). The iPhone 16e’s screen is slightly dimmer than the iPhone 16’s, but the difference is hardly noticeable.

    • Both cheaper phones lack some camera features found on the more expensive versions. The Pixel 9a’s camera sensor is smaller than the Pixel 9’s, meaning it will capture less detail and light. The iPhone 16e’s camera has one camera lens instead of two, so it can’t create certain types of special effects, such as “ultrawide” photos with a broader field of view for scenic shots of the Grand Canyon.

    • Both less expensive phones are slightly less powerful than their nicer counterparts. All four phones include the same computer processors. But the Pixel 9a has less memory for running multiple apps at the same time, and the iPhone 16e has a slightly weaker graphics processing unit for running games with heavy animation.

    • The iPhone 16e lacks the iPhone 16’s MagSafe feature, which uses a magnet to attach accessories such as power chargers and wallets to the back of the phone. The phone can still be charged wirelessly, however, using a slower charging standard called Qi.

    • Both phones can take advantage of artificial intelligence. The iPhone 16e can use Apple Intelligence to summarize text, generate images and remove photo bombers from pictures. And the Pixel 9a can run Google’s A.I., including the Gemini chatbot and similar photo editing tools. But both companies are still developing their A.I. software, which remains largely unfinished, so this feature may not be that important to most phone users.

    Long battery life is high on the priority list for people buying a new phone, and the cheaper Pixel 9a and iPhone 16e are the clear winners here. They have larger batteries partly because they have more space for them, since the phones lack some features found in their more-expensive counterparts.

    The iPhone 16e and Pixel 9a lasted about a day and a half with general use, including web browsing, photo shooting and video playing, before their batteries were depleted. The iPhone 16 and Pixel 9 both lasted about a day.

    The downsides of buying cheaper phones were most pronounced in their cameras.

    I took my corgi, Max, to a park to take photos of him in various lighting conditions, including bright daylight, in the shade and in partly shaded areas. In general, photos taken with both the Pixel 9a and Pixel 9 looked consistently clear, with accurate colors.

    But the Pixel 9a’s weaknesses were visible in more challenging lighting conditions, such as when Max sat on a shaded path with sunlight filtering through the trees. The Pixel 9a struggled to distinguish the light from the shade, and Max looked blown out by the sun. (The Pixel 9 did fine in this situation.)

    When I tested the iPhone 16e and iPhone 16 cameras, they excelled in all these tests, and the results were nearly indistinguishable.

    Both iPhones outperformed the Pixel phones in shooting videos. Videos recorded of Max strolling through the park were clearer and smoother on the iPhones; the Pixel phones’ videos looked choppier.

    So the main downside of the cheaper iPhone camera is simply what it can’t do. Because the iPhone 16e lacks a second lens, I wasn’t able to take an ultrawide shot of Max running in a field of grass.

    The more expensive phones slightly outperformed the cheaper phones in terms of speed.

    According to the speed-testing app Geekbench, the Pixel 9a is about 4 percent slower than the Pixel 9, and the iPhone 16e is 3 percent slower than the iPhone 16.

    In real-world use of the phones, most people probably won’t notice a difference. When I put the phones side by side and launched different apps and games, their performance felt about the same to me.

    If you care mostly about having a smartphone with long battery life and a good camera, you’d be happy with either the iPhone 16e or Pixel 9a. But if you care a lot about any of the premium features missing from the cheaper phones, such as taking more detailed, better-looking photos or using Apple’s MagSafe to charge your iPhone, then spending more is still a fine idea.

    Just get ready to think of a smartphone as a longer-term investment, similar to a car, since prices are likely to go up soon.



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  • How TikTok’s Parent, ByteDance, Became an A.I. Powerhouse

    How TikTok’s Parent, ByteDance, Became an A.I. Powerhouse


    The Chinese internet giant ByteDance has made some of the world’s most popular apps: TikTok and, in China, Douyin and Toutiao.

    In the United States, TikTok claims 170 million users. But in China, about 700 million use the domestic version, Douyin, and 300 million scroll the headlines on Toutiao, a news app. Every video that ByteDance’s users watch or post gives the company another data point about how people use the internet. For years, ByteDance has applied that wealth of information to make its apps more appealing, improving its ability to recommend content to keep users hooked.

    ByteDance is also using the data as the linchpin of a growing business in artificial intelligence. The company has invested billions of dollars in the infrastructure needed to power A.I. systems, building vast data centers in China and Southeast Asia and buying up advanced semiconductors. ByteDance is also on an A.I. hiring spree.

    ByteDance is best known outside China for TikTok, an app so popular that at least 20 governments have adopted partial bans over concerns about its influence on national security and public opinion.

    Concern over how ByteDance uses data has driven lawmakers in Washington to try to force a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations. On Friday, President Trump extended a looming deadline by 75 days into mid-June.

    But in China all that data has helped ByteDance expand its business far beyond social media and gain an edge in the global race to build advanced A.I. technology.

    “ByteDance has all this data, all the time, from millions of users,” said Wei Sun, a principal analyst in artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research in Beijing.

    Officials in Beijing have pushed China’s tech companies to pivot from entertainment apps to what the government sees as an existential goal: self-reliance in cutting-edge technologies that also have military applications, like semiconductors, supercomputers and artificial intelligence.

    ByteDance has embraced that mission. Last year, the company spent roughly $11 billion on infrastructure like data centers, networking equipment and computer chips, according to a report by Zheshang Securities, a Chinese financial firm.

    The Biden administration set up rules to try to keep Chinese companies from getting access to those kinds of chips, particularly ones made by Nvidia, the Silicon Valley giant. But ByteDance has found ways to get the computing power it needs to train its systems — in part by using data centers outside China and most likely, analysts say, by buying chips made by Chinese chipmakers like Huawei and Cambricon.

    While these Chinese-made chips cannot do everything the Nvidia chips can do, they work well enough to help companies like ByteDance provide A.I. services to people and businesses in China. Chinese tech companies have been “encouraged to adopt local options” for buying chips, said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, a market research firm.

    All this spending has helped ByteDance make one of the most popular artificial intelligence apps in China. Its chatbot, Doubao, gained 60 million users within its first three months on the market last year. It was China’s most popular chatbot, beating rivals made by Baidu and Alibaba-backed Moonshot, until the start-up DeepSeek released its own this year.

    ByteDance showed how closely connected its app ecosystem is with its A.I. efforts when it recently started allowing some users to chat with Doubao inside the Douyin app.

    In 2021, ByteDance started Volcano Engine, a business that lets other companies pay to use the technologies that made TikTok, Douyin and Toutiao so addictive, like tools to analyze information and the algorithms that recommend videos.

    Some of these services were natural applications of the technology that ByteDance developed for Douyin and TikTok, like filters that can make people appear much older or superimpose sparkly hearts on their faces. ByteDance used its experience making these filters to help companies like Haier and Hisense develop movement-tracking technology for gesture-controlled home appliances like smart televisions.

    GAC Group, one of China’s largest makers of electric vehicles, is using Volcano Engine to translate and manage data for cars sold outside China. And Mercedes-Benz said last year that it would use Volcano Engine in its in-car voice assistant and navigation system in China.

    ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment.

    Company job postings show that ByteDance is hiring for hundreds of A.I.-related roles. The company recently directed its engineering team to focus on a milestone that tech companies like OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek are also chasing — making an A.I. system that is as smart as or smarter than humans, often referred to as artificial general intelligence.

    While many Chinese companies have started A.I. projects, a much smaller number have the resources to invest in the personnel and computing power needed to advance the technology. Some experts expect that a research team somewhere in the world will make this kind of system within the next year or two.

    Claire Fu contributed research from Seoul.



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  • Visiting Shanghai Now: It’s a Blue-Sky, App-Based Life

    Visiting Shanghai Now: It’s a Blue-Sky, App-Based Life


    On a recent visit to Shanghai, I looked up through the canopy of trees in the former French Concession district, and realized the sky was not the customary gray but a bright blue.

    At a busy intersection near Wukang Mansion, a century-old landmark reminiscent of New York City’s Flatiron Building, the scene was oddly quiet, as barely audible electric cars and bikes whizzed by.

    And along a particularly hip stretch of Huaihai Road that would usually attract as many foreigners as locals, domestic tourists strolled along sidewalks empty of trash.

    After a lifetime of loving Shanghai in spite of its pollution, noise and mess, I felt like I had taken off my rose-colored glasses only to discover that the city had turned pink.

    In 2023, China began opening after its long pandemic closure. It began offering visa-free and transit-visa programs, setting up all-in-one apps like WeChat and Alipay to accept international credit cards and instructing hotels to welcome foreigners again.

    In December, the country expanded and simplified the visa program, allowing travelers from 54 countries, including the United States, to enter visa-free for up to 10 days if in transit to another country. (Standard-issue tourist visas, which require an in-person consulate visit and allow you to stay longer, are still an option). It also increased the number of transit-visa entry cities to 60 and is now letting visitors travel freely between them.

    All that is designed to make China easier to visit, but on my two-week stay I discovered a place that in some ways was more difficult to navigate. With proper planning and patience, though, visitors to Shanghai will discover a city just as varied and sophisticated in its post-lockdown character.

    The country’s near-total transition to app-based life has brought incredible convenience to locals, but has also created a new barrier for travelers.

    Before, businesses often had multi-language signs or websites; now, almost everything is digitized and consolidated onto the apps. I have the advantage of speaking Chinese, even if my reading abilities are limited, but for most visitors, this shift will prove challenging.

    As usual, I downloaded a VPN service before my arrival, allowing me to bypass China’s “Great Firewall” and access blocked websites, including Google. I also added the messaging platform WeChat and the payment app Alipay and, crucially, made sure they accepted my credit card before my trip.

    Both apps are required for the most basic of functions, such as hailing rides or ordering at restaurants. The first few times I pulled up Alipay for a transaction, by either scanning an establishment’s QR code or letting them scan mine, the app was glitchy and slow, but by day two, it was working — most of the time.

    One day, I strolled Tianzifang, a maze of narrow alleys lined with converted mid-19th-century shikumen homes, a style of courtyard residence distinct to Shanghai. Some are still occupied by residents, but many are now filled with crafts shops, contemporary art galleries and food stalls that sell everything from crab shell pies to fried stinky tofu.

    When I tried to buy a qipao, a traditional silk dress, the vendor’s QR reader wouldn’t accept my code. After multiple failed attempts, including a last-resort swipe of my foreign card that no one expected to work, we both gave up. I would have offered to pay in cash, but I hadn’t gotten any after being told that most businesses no longer accept it, a reality affirmed by the most humble of street-food vendors using Alipay.

    Within Alipay are various other essential apps, including ride-hailing Didi, ubiquitous enough that it’s now impossible to physically hail cabs. The rides are so affordable — around 200 yuan ($27) for an hourlong ride from the airport, and often a few dollars for inner-city trips — that I rarely took the metro. Use of Didi comes with slight barriers for visitors: Drivers are only allowed to stop in approved areas and confirm riders by asking for the last four digits of their phone numbers instead of their names.

    Many language-related issues can be resolved by using WeChat and Alipay’s translation functions, which interpret app features as well as images and speech. I found the tools most helpful at hole-in-the-wall restaurants whose menus wouldn’t have featured English even before the pandemic. At a seafood spot in Zhujiajiao, an ancient water town turned living museum on the city’s outskirts, the tool helped me discover dishes for which I wouldn’t previously have been able to read the Chinese characters.

    Other travel infrastructure has also been slow to adjust. Though hotels have been instructed to accept foreign cards, it’s best to stay at an international brand or to call to reserve a room at a boutique hotel to ensure the payment process goes smoothly. Some online booking platforms will accept a card, only for the hotel to not accept payment upon arrival. This, along with other changes, such as the now-ubiquitous surveillance cameras, can feel discordant with the country’s desire for more visitors.

    Along with growing outward, Shanghai continues to create new pockets of character at its centers. One example is along Suzhou Creek, a tributary of Shanghai’s central Huangpu River. The creek begins just north of the Bund, the waterfront promenade that continues to function as the city’s tourism focal point, home to a Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant and almost every big-name hotel.

    For decades, the areas along Suzhou Creek housed Shanghai’s industry, which moved outside the city in the 1980s, leaving behind run-down warehouses and a polluted waterway. But a $5 billion revitalization of the creek concluded in 2020, and at its heart is a 26-mile pathway that acts as a green link connecting both established and new arts and culture spots.

    At the confluence of the creek and river is the recently opened Regent Shanghai on the Bund, a 135-room hotel with gilded interiors and views of the Bund’s Art Deco facades to the south, Pudong’s glassy skyline to the east and Suzhou Creek’s casual charm to the west (from $380 a night).

    I spent a day biking westward from this point, stopping first at Rockbund, a series of alleyways flanked by red brick buildings containing galleries, shops and restaurants. At the center of it all is the Rockbund Art Museum, showcasing genre-bending works by Asian artists.

    On my way to the newly opened Fotografiska, an outpost of Stockholm’s photography museum, for lunch at its all-day bistro Mona, I passed the former General Post Office building and the Sihang Warehouse, an important site of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which took place from 1937 to 1945.

    I followed lunch with a drink across the creek at Beer Lady, a cavernous space lined with fridges and taps of brews from more than 50 countries, before spending an hour wandering the graffiti-covered lanes of M50, where assorted galleries fill former cotton mills and factories. The day’s final stop was 1,000 Trees, a complex created by the British designer Thomas Heatherwick that houses an over-the-top mall.

    The city’s other visitor strongholds were bustling but free of the crowds I was used to. At Yuyuan, a Ming dynasty-era garden surrounded by a bazaar and teahouses, the wait for soup dumplings at famed Nanxiang Steamed Bun took a fraction of the usual time.

    Crowds were also sparse in the restaurant and shopping hub of Jing An, except for the Friday night I spent at INS, a new nightlife complex in Fuxing Park. It offers music-festival-like access to all kinds of venues for a single entrance fee, and has been a hit post-lockdown with locals looking to dance more and spend less.

    For travelers who want to see more of the country, it’s now possible to reach most of the country’s provinces by bullet train. I took the train from Shanghai to nearby Nanjing, an experience that was so easy and comfortable that it felt illusory.

    Even Beijing is now only 4.5 hours by train, compared to the previous 12-hour drive or 2.5-hour flight. International travelers taking the bullet train for the first time have to present their passport in person at the train station to be able to purchase a ticket; following trips can be booked directly through Alipay.

    This new ease of access made me excited to come back and see more of the country, but some of the remaining hurdles left me feeling like China’s reality hasn’t quite caught up to its tourism goals.

    After two weeks, my Mandarin was regaining fluency, and so was my ability to use the apps. The city beneath the surface felt just within reach.





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