TIRANA, ALBANIA — Albania’s prime minister said Saturday the government will shut down the video service TikTok for one year, blaming it for inciting violence and bullying, especially among children. 

Albanian authorities held 1,300 meetings with teachers and parents following the stabbing death of a teenager in mid-November by another teen after a quarrel that started on TikTok. 

Prime Minister Edi Rama, speaking at a meeting with teachers and parents, said TikTok “would be fully closed for all. … There will be no TikTok in the Republic of Albania.” Rama said the shutdown would begin sometime next year. 

It was not immediately clear if TikTok has a representative in Albania. 

In an email response Saturday to a request for comment, TikTok asked for “urgent clarity from the Albanian government” on the case of the stabbed teenager. The company said it had “found no evidence that the perpetrator or victim had TikTok accounts, and multiple reports have in fact confirmed videos leading up to this incident were being posted on another platform, not TikTok.” 

Albanian children comprise the largest group of TikTok users in the country, according to domestic researchers. 

There has been increasing concern from Albanian parents after reports of children taking knives and other objects to school to use in quarrels or cases of bullying promoted by stories they see on TikTok. 

TikTok’s operations in China, where its parent company is based, are different, “promoting how to better study, how to preserve nature … and so on,” according to Rama. 

Albania is too small a country to impose on TikTok a change of its algorithm so that it does not promote “the reproduction of the unending hell of the language of hatred, violence, bullying and so on,” Rama’s office wrote in an email response to The Associated Press’ request for comment. Rama’s office said that in China TikTok “prevents children from being sucked into this abyss.” 

Authorities have set up a series of protective measures at schools, starting with an increased police presence, training programs and closer cooperation with parents. 

Rama said Albania would follow how the company and other countries react to the one-year shutdown before deciding whether to allow the company to resume operations in Albania. 

Not everyone agreed with Rama’s decision to close TikTok. 

“The dictatorial decision to close the social media platform TikTok … is a grave act against freedom of speech and democracy,” said Ina Zhupa, a lawmaker of the main opposition Democratic Party. “It is a pure electoral act and abuse of power to suppress freedoms.” 

Albania holds parliamentary elections next year. 
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Generative artificial intelligence companies are racing to build on the popularity of programs like ChatGPT, but AI regulation has not kept pace with the technology. Now, an incoming administration could favor U.S. domination over risk mitigation. Tina Trinh reports.
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As new potential threats from Chinese hackers were identified this week, the federal government issued one of its strongest warnings to date about the need for Americans — and in particular government officials and other “highly targeted” individuals — to secure their communications against eavesdropping and interception.

The warning came as news was breaking about a Commerce Department investigation into the possibility that computer network routers manufactured by the Chinese firm TP-Link may pose a threat to the millions of U.S. businesses, households and government agencies that use them.

Also on Wednesday, Congress took long-awaited steps toward funding a program that will purge other Chinese technology from U.S. telecommunications systems. The so-called rip-and-replace program targets gear manufactured by Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE.

Too far behind

While experts said the recent actions are a step in the right direction, they warned that U.S. policymakers have been extremely slow to react to a mountain of evidence that Chinese hackers have long been targeting essential communications and infrastructure systems in the U.S.

The lack of action has persisted despite law enforcement and intelligence agencies repeatedly sounding alarms.

In January, while testifying before the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “There has been far too little public focus on the fact that [People’s Republic of China] hackers are targeting our critical infrastructure — our water treatment plants, our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our transportation systems. And the risk that poses to every American requires our attention now.”

A year previously, Wray had warned lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee that his investigators were badly outnumbered.

“To give you a sense of what we’re up against, if each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intel analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, Chinese hackers would still outnumber FBI Cyber personnel by at least 50-to-1,” Wray said.

Decades of complexity

Part of the problem, experts said, is that it is difficult for policymakers to summon the political will to make changes that could be disruptive to the lives and livelihoods of U.S. citizens in the absence of public concern about the problem.

“It still remains very, very difficult to impress upon average, typical everyday citizens the gravity of Chinese espionage, or the extent of it,” said Bill Drexel, a fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

He contrasted the relatively muted public response to the recent revelation of a Chinese hacking operation known as Salt Typhoon, which compromised mobile telephone networks throughout the country, with the uproar that accompanied the far less serious appearance of a Chinese spy balloon over the U.S. mainland in 2023.

“That just goes to show this … problem where really grave issues that are intangible — that are just in cyberspace — are really hard to wrap our minds around,” Drexel told VOA.

“For four decades, we intertwined our supply chains very deeply with China, and our digital systems became more and more complex, allowing more and more compounding ways to be hacked, to be compromised,” Drexel said.

“We’ve just started to try to change course on this stuff,” he added. “But there’s so much momentum for so long on these issues, and they continue to compound in complexity, such that it’s just really hard to catch up.”

Warning ‘highly targeted’ Americans

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued guidance on Wednesday, reporting that it “has identified cyber espionage activity by People’s Republic of China (PRC) government-affiliated threat actors targeting commercial telecommunications infrastructure.”

It continued, “This activity enabled the theft of customer call records and the compromise of private communications for a limited number of highly targeted individuals.”

The warning appeared to be related to the Salt Typhoon hack that, according to government investigators, compromised all the major mobile phone carriers in the U.S., giving the Chinese government extraordinary access to the communications among millions of Americans.

The five-page CISA document outlines steps that the agency advises all Americans, but particularly those most likely to be targeted, to take immediately.

The first is to immediately curtail use of standard mobile communications platforms, such as voice calls and Short Message Service (SMS) texting. Instead, the agency advises Americans to restrict their communications to free messaging platforms that offer end-to-end encryption, such as Signal, which support one-on-one and group chats, as well as voice and video calls. Data sent with end-to-end encryption is extremely difficult to decrypt, even if a malicious actor is able to intercept it during transmission.

Among the other advice CISA offered was to avoid using SMS messages for multifactor authentication by switching to apps that provide authenticator codes or, where possible, adopting hardware-based security keys for highly sensitive accounts. Other recommendations included the use of complex and random passwords stored in password manager software, as well as platform-specific suggestions for iPhone and Android users.

TP-Link concerns

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported, and other outlets subsequently confirmed, that the Commerce Department, as well as the Justice and Defense departments, are investigating reports that computer routers manufactured by the Shenzhen-based TP-Link are one vector of attack for Chinese hackers.

TP-Link currently dominates the market for computer routers in the U.S., with nearly two-thirds of total market share. In October, a report from Microsoft revealed that one Chinese hacking operation it identified as CovertNetwork-1658 has compromised thousands of TP-Link routers to create a network that is used by “multiple Chinese threat actors” to gain illicit access to computer networks around the world.

The Journal’s reporting also revealed that the Commerce Department is considering a ban on the sale of TP-Link routers in the U.S. next year, an action that could significantly disrupt the U.S. market for networking hardware.

Rip and replace

Congress on Wednesday took long-delayed action to address a different potential threat from China, allocating $3 billion to a program that will remove telecommunications equipment manufactured by Huawei and ZTE from rural telecommunications networks in the U.S.

Funding for the rip-and-replace program arrives years after the U.S. identified the two companies as posing a potential threat.

Beginning in the first Trump administration and continuing during Joe Biden’s time in office, the U.S. pressured allies around the world to block the installation of Huawei and ZTE 5G cellular communications equipment from their networks, in some cases threatening to stop sharing sensitive intelligence with allies that failed to comply. 
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washington — Experts on cybersecurity and online foreign influence campaigns are urging social media company Bluesky, whose app has exploded in popularity in recent weeks, to step up moderation to counter potential state-sponsored influence efforts.

Over the past month, Bluesky, a microblogging platform with its roots in Twitter, has seen one of its biggest increases in new user registrations since it was publicly released in February. Over 25 million are now on the platform, close to half of whom joined after the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Rose Wang, Bluesky’s chief operating officer, said in a recent interview that Bluesky does not intend to push any political ideologies.

“We have no political viewpoint that we are trying to promote,” she said in early December.

Exploiting users’ political leanings

Many who joined Bluesky have cited user experience as one of the reasons for migrating from social media platform X. They also have said they joined the platform after Election Day because they are critics of Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump. Some commentators in the U.S. have questioned whether Bluesky is risking becoming an echo chamber of the left.

Some experts contend the platform’s liberal-leaning users could be exploited by foreign propagandists. Joe Bodnar, who tracks foreign influence operations for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told VOA Mandarin that Russian propaganda often appeals to the anti-establishment left in the U.S. on contentious topics, like Gaza, gun violence and America’s global dominance.

“The Kremlin wants to make those arguments even louder,” Bodnar said. “Sometimes that means they play to the left.”

So far, at least three accounts that belong to RT, a Russia-controlled media outlet, have joined Bluesky. Sputnik Brazil is also actively posting on the platform.

VOA Mandarin found that at least two Chinese accounts that belong to state broadcaster CGTN have joined the platform.

Bluesky does not assign verification labels. One way to authenticate an account is for the person or organization to link it to the domain of its official website.

There are at least four other accounts that claim to be Chinese state media outlets, including China Daily, the Global Times and People’s Daily. None of the three publications replied to VOA’s emails inquiring about these accounts’ authenticity.

Additionally, Beijing has played heavily to the Western left on certain global issues. China has consistently called for a ceasefire in Gaza and blamed the West for supporting Israel.

But those familiar with Chinese and Russian state media say the left-leaning user base on Bluesky actually could give Beijing and Moscow a hard time for pushing their narratives.

“Bluesky isn’t the most hospitable place for Russian narratives,” Bodnar said.

Sean Haines, a British national who used to work for Chinese state media outlets, shared similar opinions in a recent blog post about Bluesky.

“With its predominately Western liberal leaning, the platform also will be an uphill challenge for those looking to push overtly nationalistic viewpoints,” he wrote.

Most of the Chinese and Russian state media accounts have only hundreds of followers, with RT en Espanol at the top, with nearly 7,000.

Could ‘decentralization’ be detrimental?

China and Russia have been finding ways to reach the American public through covert disinformation operations on social media. During this year’s election, disinformation campaigns connected to China and Russia promoted claims that cast doubt on the integrity of the voting process.

Similar tactics could soon be coming to Bluesky.

“I don’t think Bluesky is more vulnerable to influence campaigns than X or other social networks,” Jennifer Victoria Scurrell, a researcher on AI-supported influence operations, told VOA Mandarin. But Scurrell, of ETH Zurich’s Center for Security Studies, said Bluesky’s decentralized moderation approach is flawed.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, started Bluesky as an internal project to give users more power over moderation. Bluesky then went independent in 2021.

“Our mission is to develop and drive large-scale technologies of open and decentralized public conversation,” the company says on its website.

To do that, Bluesky “decentralized” its moderation authority, giving users tools to customize their experience on the site.

Bluesky offers a universal basic moderation setting for every user, which labels content such as extremism, misinformation, fake accounts and adult content. Users can choose whether to see the content labeled by Bluesky. Users can report to Bluesky content or accounts they believe have violated Bluesky’s guidelines.

On top of that, users get to create their own moderation settings to label or filter out certain content and accounts. Other users can subscribe to these customized settings, should they choose.

Scurrell, who helps test security weaknesses for OpenAI as a contractor, told VOA Mandarin the decentralized approach to moderation could be a double-edged sword.

“Societal values are diverse, contextual and local, which makes decentralized moderation an appealing concept,” she wrote in her replies to VOA.

She warned that outsourcing content moderation to users, though, “raises serious concerns” because the approach would give bad actors the same amount of power as normal users.

“What happens if an entire node is taken over by malicious actors spreading disinformation or manipulative content,” she wrote, or “if the system gets hijacked by an army of bots?”

VOA Mandarin emailed Bluesky a list of detailed questions about its moderation policy against potential foreign influence attempts but did not receive a response.

Experts have urged Bluesky to implement measures to counter potential foreign influence campaigns.

In a recent blog post, Sarah Cook, an independent China watcher and former China director at Freedom House, urged Bluesky to label state media accounts, a practice exercised by many social media companies, so users know of these accounts’ ties to foreign governments.

Eugenio Benincasa, an expert on Chinese cyber threats at ETH Zurich, asserts that studying how Chinese tech companies help Beijing surveil social media platforms and manipulate online discussions can help Bluesky better prepare.

“It is crucial to thoroughly study the evolving influence tactics enabled by tools like public opinion monitoring systems to identify vulnerabilities that may have been overlooked or are emerging, in order to develop effective safeguards,” Benincasa said.
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. cybersecurity watchdog CISA is telling senior American government officials and politicians to immediately switch to end-to-end encrypted messaging following intrusions at major American telecoms blamed on Chinese hackers. 

In written guidance released on Wednesday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said “individuals who are in senior government or senior political positions” should “immediately review and apply” a series of best practices around the use of mobile devices. 

The first recommendation: “Use only end-to-end encrypted communications.” 

End-to-end encryption — a data protection technique that aims to make data unreadable by anyone except its sender and its recipient — is baked into various chat apps, including Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage, and the privacy-focused app Signal. Corporate offerings, which allow end-to-end encryption, also include Microsoft’s Teams and Zoom Communications’ meetings. 

CISA’s message is the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings issued by American officials in the wake of dramatic hacks of U.S. telecom companies by a group dubbed “Salt Typhoon.” 

Last week, Democratic Senator Ben Ray Lujan said, “this attack likely represents the largest telecommunications hack in our nation’s history.” 

U.S. officials have blamed China for the hacking. Beijing routinely denies allegations of cyberespionage. 
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court decided on Wednesday to hear a bid by TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance, to block a law intended to force the sale of the short-video app by January 19 or face a ban on national security grounds. 

The justices did not immediately act on an emergency request by TikTok and ByteDance, as well as by some of its users who post content on the social media platform, for an injunction to halt the looming ban, opting instead to hear arguments on the matter on January 10.  

The challengers are appealing a lower court’s ruling that upheld the law. TikTok is used by about 170 million Americans. 

Congress passed the measure in April and President Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed it into law. The Justice Department had said that as a Chinese company, TikTok poses “a national-security threat of immense depth and scale” because of its access to vast amounts of data on American users, from locations to private messages, and its ability to secretly manipulate content that Americans view on the app. TikTok has said it poses no imminent threat to U.S. security.  

TikTok and ByteDance asked the Supreme Court on December 16 to pause the law, which they said violates free speech protections under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.  

TikTok on Wednesday said it was pleased the court will take up the issue. “We believe the court will find the TikTok ban unconstitutional so the over 170 million Americans on our platform can continue to exercise their free speech rights,” the company said. 

The companies said that being shuttered for even one month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its U.S. users and undermine its ability to attract advertisers and recruit content creators and employee talent. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington on December 6 rejected the First Amendment arguments by the companies.  

In their filing to the Supreme Court, TikTok and ByteDance said that “if Americans, duly informed of the alleged risks of ‘covert’ content manipulation, choose to continue viewing content on TikTok with their eyes wide open, the First Amendment entrusts them with making that choice, free from the government’s censorship.” 

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday, in a brief filed with the Supreme Court, urged the court to reject any delay, comparing TikTok to a hardened criminal. 

A U.S. ban on TikTok would make the company far less valuable to ByteDance and its investors, and hurt businesses that depend on TikTok to drive their sales. 

Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully tried to ban TikTok during his first term in the White House in 2020, has reversed his stance and promised during the presidential race this year that he would try to save TikTok. Trump said on Dec. 16 that he has “a warm spot in my heart for TikTok” and that he would “take a look” at the matter. 

Trump takes office on January 20, the day after the TikTok deadline under the law. 

In its decision, the D.C. Circuit wrote, “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” 

TikTok has denied it has or ever would share U.S. user data, accusing U.S. lawmakers in the lawsuit of advancing speculative concerns. It has characterized the ban as a “radical departure from this country’s tradition of championing an open Internet.”  

The dispute comes at a time of growing trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economies after the Biden administration placed new restrictions on the Chinese chip industry and China responded with a ban on exports of gallium, germanium and antimony, metals which are used in making high-tech microchips, to the United States. 

The U.S. law would bar providing certain services to TikTok and other foreign adversary-controlled apps including offering it through app stores such as Apple and Alphabet’s Google, effectively preventing TikTok’s continued U.S. use unless ByteDance divests TikTok by the deadline. 

An unimpeded ban could open the door to a future crackdown on other foreign-owned apps. In 2020, Trump had also tried to ban WeChat, owned by Chinese company Tencent, but was blocked by the courts.
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