For a brief moment in a five-hour House hearing on Thursday, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew let his frustration show. Asked if TikTok was prepared to split off from its Chinese parent company if ordered to do so by the U.S. government, to safeguard Americans’ online data, Chew went on offense.
Man Recalls A Dating Catastrophe When He Invited A Felon He Met Online Over To Hangout

There exists a subreddit where people explain stories by setting the precedent of, “Today I F–ked Up,” called “r/TIFU.”
One man shared how he messed up by inviting a girl over to his place, not expecting the night to take a turn for the worst before he had to go to work the next day.
His second date turned into a night of horror after his date started drinking during dinner.
In order to provide some context, he explained how he met the girl on Facebook Dating and had gone on his first date with her over the weekend.
“I did notice that she only smiled with her top row of teeth in the pictures and figured that her bottom teeth might be effed up, but didn’t think much of it,” he explained, already pointing out potential red flags. “She had trad wife energy and I was into it.”
He explained that during their first date, he had learned a lot about her, including her history of battling eating disorders which explained the messed up teeth.
He learned that she doesn’t drink often and that she lives with her parents because she’s preparing for surgery that will require a lot of physical therapy.
“This is all a red herring — nothing about this TIFU has to do with the teeth,” he explains. “I wanted to mention it because I was so focused on this that I didn’t pick up the other red flags.”
After inviting her over for dinner on Thursday, the plan was that her father would drop her off at his house because her car had been wrecked and he would drive her home later.
“She also tells me that she is a felon like 1 hour before we hang out. Okay…” he continues. “‘Don’t worry, it’s just 3 DUIs and it’s over with.’ Thanks for telling me? [No, really, I should’ve paid attention to this red flag].”
When she arrives at his house and after pleasantries, he starts cooking a shrimp curry soup and she asks for a drink.
Taking a look at his cabinet filled with alcohol, she selects his most expensive bottle of tequila and immediately throws back two shots of it.
“Biggest f–k up: I presume that EVERYONE is good at self-regulation of their drinking,” he explains. “It’s just what I believe — we know if we are getting toasted or not and it’s intentional.”
As adults, it’s not presumptuous to assume that other adults are responsible enough to be able to manage how much liquor they consume — there was no way he could predict what would happen that night.
“I join and catch up with 2 shots. I get a seltzer for myself and she grabs a cocktail. And another one. 4 drinks in 40 minutes for this 110 lb person. I assume she’s good at holding her liquor.”
By this point, the woman is “beyond drunk” while he’s barely tipsy, so he denies her sexual advances and allows her to pass out on his bed with a trash can next to her while he goes to watch some TV or play video games — opting to check up on her from time to time.
When he comes back to check on her, he noticed she had peed in his bed.
“I attempt to rouse her and alert her she has soiled herself (and my bed). She wakes up and asks me why I’m waking her up and then tries to flirt with me,” he continues. “I then notice she’s soiling herself. Again. Actively. While trying to seduce me.”
He attempts to get her on the toilet and relieve herself, giving her water to drink so she can sober herself up as well, but she’s reluctant to do either.
Instead, he offers her towels and eases her down onto a fuzzy mat he has in the bathroom while he spends the next five hours (until 4:30 AM) cleaning everything that she soiled.
At 5 AM, he decided to try and get some sleep since he was working at 9 AM, but she woke up an hour and a half later confused, naked, and embarrassed.
She eats the shrimp from the soup he made, drinks another 4 oz of gin (at 7:30 AM), and tries to join him on the couch where he was trying to get some shut-eye.
He decided the best course of action from here on out would be to get in contact with her parents.
Freaking out, he leaves her “catatonic” on the couch, and decided to try and call her parents using her phone — fortunate enough that he remembered her birthday in order to use it as her passcode.
“I explain every single detail of the happenings of the night and they are mortified,” he writes. “I tell them I have work and they need to come get her now.”
An hour later, her father arrives at his house and starts yelling at her — which he quickly cuts short because he doesn’t want yelling in his house.
Since his daughter is unable to stand on her own, her father picks her up and she starts to protest — peeing on her father and the man’s couch once more.
After putting her in the car and collecting her things, the father came back to the man and explained, “She was almost 1 week sober. And this happens. Not your fault, son.”
Suddenly, everything made sense to him — the DUI, the drinking, and everything that he knew about her.
Hours later, her mother texted him, apologized, and told him that she would be there later to pick up her daughter’s clothes.
Had he noticed the red flags sooner, he may have been able to prevent her from relapsing, but there was no way he could have known.
If you know someone who is struggling with drug addiction, reach out for help. SAMHSA’s helpline is available 24/7. 1-800-662-HELP (4357), or TTY: 1-800-487-4889.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.
TikTok hearing obscures wider issue of Americans’ online privacy

“I don’t think ownership is the issue here. With a lot of respect: American social companies don’t have a great record with privacy and data security. I mean, look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” Chew said, referring to the 2018 scandal in which Facebook users’ data was found to have been secretly harvested years earlier by a British political consulting firm.
He’s not wrong. At a hearing in which TikTok was often portrayed as a singular, untenable threat to Americans’ online privacy, it would have been easy to forget that the country’s online privacy problems run far deeper than any single app. And the people most responsible for failing to safeguard Americans’ data, arguably, are American lawmakers.
The bipartisan uproar over TikTok’s Chinese ownership stems from the concern that China’s laws could allow its authoritarian government to demand or clandestinely gain access to sensitive user data, or tweak its algorithms to distort the information its young users see. The concerns are genuine. And yet the United States has failed to bequeath Americans most of the rights it now accuses TikTok of threatening.
While the European Union has far-reaching privacy laws, Congress has not agreed on national privacy legislation, leaving Americans’ online data rights up to a patchwork of state and federal laws. In the meantime, reams of data on Americans’ shopping habits, browsing history and real-time location, collected by websites and mobile apps, is bought and sold on the open market in a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. If the Chinese Communist Party wanted that data, it could get huge volumes of it without ever tapping TikTok. (In fact, TikTok says it has stopped tracking U.S. users’ precise location, putting it ahead of many American apps on at least one important privacy front.)
That point was not entirely lost on the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which convened Thursday’s hearing. Last year, their committee became the first to advance a comprehensive data privacy bill, hashing out a hard-won compromise. But it stalled amid qualms from House and Senate leaders.
Likewise, worries about TikTok’s addictive algorithms, its effects on teens’ mental health, and its hosting of propaganda and extreme content are common to its American rivals, including Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Instagram. Congress has not meaningfully addressed those, either.
And if Chinese ownership is the issue, TikTok has plenty of company there, as well: A glance at Apple’s iOS App Store rankings earlier this week showed that four of the top five apps were Chinese-owned: TikTok, its ByteDance sibling CapCut, and the online shopping apps Shein and Temu.
The enthusiasm for cracking down on TikTok in particular is understandable. It’s huge, it’s fast-growing, and railing against it allows lawmakers to position themselves simultaneously as champions of American children and tough on China. Banning it would seem to offer a quick fix to the problems lawmakers spent five hours on Thursday lamenting.
And yet, without an overhaul of online privacy laws, it ignores that those problems exist on all the other apps that haven’t been banned.
“In most ways, they’re like most of the Big Tech companies,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said of TikTok after the hearing. “They can use Americans’ data any way they want.” She and several other committee members said they’d prefer to address TikTok as part a broader privacy bill, rather than a one-off ban.
But the compromises required to pass big legislation can be politically costly, while railing against TikTok costs nothing. If Chew can take any consolation from Thursday’s hearing, it’s that congressional browbeating of tech companies are far more common than congressional action against them.
For an example, he has only to look at the one he raised in that moment of frustration: For all the hearings, all the grilling of Mark Zuckerberg over Cambridge Analytica, Russian election interference and more, Facebook is still here — and now Congress has moved on to a new scapegoat.
Celebrity doctor linked to Facebook rapist Thabo Bester leaves rented Hyde Park mansion

Johannesburg – Dr Nandipha Magudumana, the celebrity doctor linked with Facebook rapist Thabo Bester, has allegedly abandoned her rented Hyde Park …
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Watching Meta Over One Year: This Was The Headline On Meta Employees One Year Ago; What Changed? – Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)

Exactly one year ago, on March 21, 2022, this was the headline: ‘Facebook Parent Meta Employees Seek Greener Pastures Post Stock Meltdown.’
Then, reports claimed Meta Platforms, Inc META employees were burdened with underwater stock options and looked to exit following plunging stock prices.
As of March 2022, Meta employees with $100,000 worth of restricted stock units around its September stock peak found them worth ~$57,000.
A series of internal leaks put massive political pressure on the company fueled by the multibillion-dollar sting of privacy changes from Apple Inc AAPL and Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google.
Opportunists from other companies like Microsoft Corp MSFT, whose price was down 10.3% as of March 2022, could theoretically “buy the dip” by taking a job at a beaten-down company like Meta and getting more stock options at a lower price.
However, by November, things changed, and the falling stock price signaled trouble. Finally, in November 2022, Meta fired 11,000 people, or 13% of its staff, scaled back budgets, and shrunk its real estate footprint in the face of macro uncertainties.
Again on March 14, 2023, Meta disclosed plans to downsize team strength by around 10,000 people and to close about 5,000 additional open roles to make it a better technology company and improve its financial performance amid macro uncertainties.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that his restructuring plans focused on flattening its organizational structure, dumping lower-priority projects, and reducing hiring rates.
Meta highlighted investing in building AI tools as ChatGPT adoption gains momentum worldwide. It emphasized how the last downsizing improved efficiency and reduced costs by cutting out duplicative work and helping execute its highest priorities faster.
As of March 2023, Meta reportedly slashed the price of Quest Pro to fend off competition from Apple’s upcoming MR headset launch. It also remained rattled by the success of ByteDance Ltd TikTok and had forgone projects to win back lost users to the popular Chinese social media platform.
Major tech players saw huge losses in 2022, weighed by higher interest rates, high inflation, and uncertain economic conditions. Meta lost two-thirds of its value. Amazon.Com Inc AMZN also lost half its value.
Interestingly, Meta shares gained over 64% YTD, beating the broader index returns of 14.96%.
Price Action: META shares closed higher by 2.24% at $204.28 on Thursday.
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