On Wednesday, several popular apps owned by Meta, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, experienced outages affecting users nationwide. Reports of disruptions began surfacing around 1 p.m. ET, with the majority of issues concentrated on the mobile apps rather than desktop versions.
A federal appeals court upheld a law requiring TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the app by January 19 or be banned in the United States.
Chase Strangio, the transgender ACLU attorney arguing before the Supreme Court to challenge Tennessee’s SB1, stirred controversy during a CNN appearance on Wednesday by claiming that children as young as two years old can know they are transgender. Tennessee’s SB1 law bans puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-change surgeries for minors, a move the ACLU claims violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
After its Facebook account was suspended, the renowned American gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson expressed gratitude to Elon Musk and X (formerly Twitter) for championing free speech amid what the company described as ongoing assaults on the First and Second Amendments.
Two Dallas parents have filed a lawsuit against Dallas Independent School District (DISD) and several administrators, alleging their children faced retaliation for not complying with the district’s 2021 mask mandate. The parents claim staff at George Bannerman Dealey Montessori Academy subjected their fifth- and eighth-grade children to abuse and segregation, despite medical exemptions from the mandate.
In a stunning escalation of its standoff with Big Tech, Russia has slapped Google with a colossal fine of $20.5 decillion, a figure vastly surpassing the combined GDP of the entire world. The unprecedented sum stems from Google’s decision to block Russian state-backed media channels on YouTube, including prominent outlets like RT and Sputnik, which were restricted following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russian authorities argue that these channels’ bans represent censorship and a violation of national sovereignty.
