Tea

The China platform faces political risks and e-commerce challenges in its overseas push ahead of a possible IPO.

• Xiaohongshu is moving beyond its previous focus on the Chinese diaspora.
• The platform currently offers limited features to foreign users.
• A larger user base overseas raises regulatory risks for the platform.

People still want the TV and movie experience offered by traditional studios, but social platforms are becoming competitive for their entertainment time—and even more competitive for the business models that studios have relied on. Social video platforms offer a seemingly endless variety of free content, algorithmically optimized for engagement and advertising. They wield advanced ad tech and AI to match advertisers with global audiences, now drawing over half of US ad spending. As the largest among them move into the living room, will they be held to higher standards of quality?

At the same time, the streaming on-demand video (SVOD) revolution has fragmented pay TV audiences, imposed higher costs on studios now operating direct-to-consumer services, and delivered thinner margins for their efforts. It can be a tougher business, yet the premium video experience offered by streamers often sets the bar for quality storytelling, acting, and world-building. How can studios control costs, attract advertisers, and compete for attention? Are there stronger points of collaboration that can benefit both streamers looking to reach global audiences and social platforms that lack high-quality franchises?

This year’s Digital Media Trends lends data to the argument that video entertainment has been disrupted by social platforms, creators, user-generated content (UGC), and advanced modeling for content recommendations and advertising. Such platforms may be establishing the new center of gravity for media and entertainment, drawing more of the time people spend on entertainment and the money that brands spend to reach them.

Our survey of US consumers reveals that media and entertainment companies—including advertisers—are competing for an average of six hours of daily media and entertainment time per person (figure 1). And this number doesn’t seem to be growing.2 Not only is it unlikely that any one form of media will command all six hours, but each user likely has a different mix of SVOD, UGC, social, gaming, music, podcasts, and potentially other forms of digital media that make up these entertainment hours.

Today, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) added 80 entities to the Entity List from China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), South Africa, Iran, Taiwan, and others for activities contrary to U.S. national security and foreign policy.

A lawsuit filed by several authors against Meta centers on Meta's alleged use of pirated books for AI training data and the technical details of BitTorrent which was used to obtain them. Yesterday, Meta filed a motion for summary judgment, while countering the authors' request to resolve the copyright claims in their favor. Meta's request includes new information, including the revelation that its uploads of 'pirate' library data were roughly 30% of the data it downloaded.

• Today, we’re rolling out a new School Partnership Program for Instagram, designed to help educators report potential teen safety issues, including bullying, directly to us.
• We’ve worked with the International Society for Technology in Education and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development to test the School Partnership program, and we’ve seen promising early results in addressing more teen safety issues in schools.
• We’ll continue to listen to parents and to create tools – like the School Partnership Program and Teen Accounts – that help keep kids safe online.

we are excited to announce the formation of a talent experience program along with an equity fund to grant participating actors a stake in our company's future.

In this post the authors explore how today’s contractual restrictions on AI mirror the concerns libraries raised 20 years ago during the US Copyright Office Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 104 study. Further, they examine the differences between copyright law – which enables access through fair use and other rights – and contracts, which can carry legal weight and intimidation tactics, such as copyright warnings.

On February 20, 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced an inquiry into “how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.” In its request for public comment, the FTC further claims that platforms may do so using “opaque or unpredictable internal procedures,” with little explanation, notice, or opportunity for appeal.

Tech Policy Press has a long track record of publishing calls for greater transparency from technology platforms. In December 2024, for example, Sandra González-Bailón and David Lazer criticized the lack of accountability for how Meta specifically, and other platforms generally, act at critical moments. Taking inspiration from former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, they argue that users are “entitled to understand what speech platforms make visible.” A month later, they argued in a separate piece that the nature of social media is such that “companies are always choosing what people do and do not see.” Content moderation is the process or processes by which platforms make this choice.

However, President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans frequently equate content moderation to censorship against conservative users. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has himself compared content moderation to censorship on several occasions. This political context has raised concerns from critics across the political spectrum that the FTC’s inquiry will end in a partisan effort to exert greater government control over platform trust and safety.

Science, as it turns out, has already inquired into the question of whether or not social media content moderation unfairly penalizes conservative speech. We asked leading scholars on this issue the following questions:

1. Do social media companies disproportionately moderate posts from one side of the political spectrum? If so, is this the result of bias or something else?
2. Second, does social science show that one side of the political spectrum is unfairly penalized or rewarded by platform recommendation algorithms? If so, which side and why?

In total, we received fourteen replies. To summarize, science holds that to the extent conservatives experience content moderation more often, it is because they are more likely to share information from untrustworthy news sources, even when other conservative users rate the trustworthiness of those sources. Regarding the second question about algorithmic bias, the evidence largely suggests that conservative sources and accounts tend to receive more engagement, not less—not because of platform bias but more likely because of the nature of the right-wing news ecosystem and the valence of the content shared in it.