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X'A Very Precarious Situation': How Trump's Order Could Impact The Fates of Snap, TikTok and Grindr
Tami Abdollah was dot.LA's senior technology reporter. She was previously a national security and cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. She's been a reporter for the AP in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and for L.A.'s NPR affiliate KPCC. Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. A native Angeleno, she's traveled the world on $5 a day, taught trad climbing safety classes and is an avid mountaineer. Follow her on Twitter.

An executive order that could enable federal regulators to punish social media companies for how they moderate content on their sites would have far-reaching impacts, especially on smaller companies with an online presence, including TikTok, Snap Inc. and Grindr, that lack the budgets to moderate every single message or post on their apps.
President Donald Trump threatened such a change via executive order after Twitter fact checked tweets that spread misinformation related to voting earlier this week. Rather than edit the tweet or block it, the social media company inserted a line that said "get the facts about mail-in ballots."
At the heart of the new executive order lies a complex 1996 law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that has been broadly interpreted by the courts over the years as shielding internet sites and apps from being financially liable for what user tweets, posts or generally publishes on their platforms.
It has also protected websites from being held liable for moderating content they see as obscene, violent or otherwise objectionable.
"Section 230 is one of the building blocks for free speech online," Emma Llanos, director of the free expression project at Center for Democracy & Technology, told dot.LA. "It has been absolutely essential to the creation of very large platforms and very small platforms, to the creation of all kinds of online communities, and to (enabling) different approaches to content moderation."
The section also gives people who operate those online services the legal certainty that they won't end up in court fighting about whether they appropriately took down a specific post out of the tens of thousands on their site, or if they've missed moderating something. "It gives some breathing room," Llanos said.
Rather than battle an endless number of lawsuits, such companies could either decide to not moderate content at all, or go out of business, experts say.
Santa Monica-based Snap Inc. has relied on Section 230 in numerous court cases, including one involving its speed filter where victims claimed that the company encouraged reckless driving by providing a speed filter that gauges and notes a driver's speed at the time of its use. Other cases have involved the use of Snapchats for harassment between users.
"At the core, those claims try to hold Snapchat accountable over how Snapchatters misuse their tools," said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and expert on Section 230. "A reduction of 230 will put Snapchat in a very precarious situation. What do they do if they can't rely on this legal immunity?"
Should such immunity change, Snapchat and relativity smaller companies like it — by far, the majority of social media companies that aren't Facebook or Google — could be forced from their industries under a hail of lawsuits, experts told dot.LA on Thursday.
"That's a very likely scenario for companies like Snapchat," Goldman said. "Snapchat can't police its premises well enough to prevent people from doing bad things. You can't have a Snapchat conversation where both sides of the conversation is reviewed by Snap employees before it's delivered a) that's a privacy violation and b) it's not instantaneous.
"What's Snapchat at that point, without any chatting?"
Snap Inc. declined to comment Thursday.
In another high-profile case, a man used the dating app Grindr to terrorize his ex-boyfriend, by creating fake profiles that impersonated him, with vulgar screen names and false information. The imposter directed hundreds of potential suitors to his ex's apartment or workplace on a daily basis.
West Hollywood-based Grindr was protected from financial liability in that case by Section 230, even if in the end, they could or should have done more to ensure the harassing content was flagged and removed, Goldman said.
Meanwhile, Culver City-based TikTok's use of Section 230 is more opaque because it's owned by Beijing-based technology firm ByteDance Ltd. It's unclear how much their leadership is swayed by the liability protections offered by Section 230 or by Chinese internet liability laws and cooperation with the Chinese government, said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and expert on Section 230.
A TikTok spokesperson did not respond to repeated requests Thursday for comment.
TikTok said last month in a blog post that it plans to open a "transparency center" in Los Angeles that would try to provide outside experts a view into how TikTok's teams moderate content on its platform and give insight into its moderation systems, processes and policies. The company also created a committee of outside experts to advise it on its content moderation.
Dan Schnur, a political strategist and professor, is a member of that advisory committee. He told dot.LA that the core of the outside group's efforts is to figure out how to protect young people from dangerous interactions online. Schnur emphasized that he does not speak for TikTok.
"Even though the president's executive order seems to be motivated by concerns about political speech, it appears that this would also greatly impact a platform's ability to monitor any types of conversation," Schnur said. "TikTok has devoted a great deal of time and attention to making sure that young people are not exposed to information that would compromise their safety. My personal worry is that if a social media platform didn't have the ability to label political content, it'd be even more difficult to protect children from potentially dangerous interactions online."
In mid-May, a coalition of child privacy rights groups filed a complaint against TikTok with the FTC, alleging that the platform is violating terms it previously agreed to when it was fined $5.7 million in early 2019 for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Numerous U.S. Congressmen on both sides of the aisle have called for an investigation, including 14 House Democrats who sent a letter to the FTC chairman on Thursday.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who co-authored Section 230, said in a statement Thursday that President Trump's planned executive order is illegal and an effort to bully companies into giving Trump favorable treatment. He said eroding such protections will only make online content more likely to be false and dangerous. Section 230 also doesn't prevent internet companies from moderating offensive or false content, nor does it change the First Amendment of the Constitution.
"Trump is desperately trying to steal for himself the power of the courts and Congress to rewrite decades of settled law around Section 230," Wyden said. "All for the ability to spread unfiltered lies."
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Reporter Sam Blake contributed to this story. Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter @latams. You can also email me, or ask for my Signal.
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Tami Abdollah was dot.LA's senior technology reporter. She was previously a national security and cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. She's been a reporter for the AP in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times and for L.A.'s NPR affiliate KPCC. Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. A native Angeleno, she's traveled the world on $5 a day, taught trad climbing safety classes and is an avid mountaineer. Follow her on Twitter.
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Astroforge Raises $13M To Mine Asteroids
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Y Combinator startup Astroforge wants to use its new $13 million seed round to mine asteroids.
The Huntington Beach-based company aims to become the first company to bring asteroid resources back to Earth, TechCrunch reported Thursday. Initialized Capital led the funding round and was joined by investors Seven Seven Six, EarthRise, Aera VC, Liquid 2 and Soma.
“When you look at the opportunity here—and the opportunity really is to mine the universe—this is such a huge opportunity that investors are willing to make the bet on a longer time horizon,” Astroforge co-founder Matt Gialich told TechCrunch.
Virgin Orbit veteran Gialich launched the company alongside his co-founder, SpaceX and NASA alum Jose Acain, in January; the four-person firm, which Gialich said is now hiring for seven more positions, hopes to successfully mine an asteroid by the end of the decade. The seed money will fund Astroforge’s first two missions, with its first being a demo flight scheduled for a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare launch next year.
While Astroforge is keeping the specifics of its technology close to the vest, the company told TechCrunch that it involves a “high-rated vacuum” and requires a zero-gravity environment, but won’t involve actually landing on the asteroid itself. The company is eyeing asteroids ranging from 20 meters to 1.5 kilometers in diameter that carry high concentrations of platinum-group metals, which limits its potential targets to less than 1 million of the 10 million asteroids near Earth.
Astroforge wouldn’t be the first to attempt this science fiction-esque endeavor, though commercial space mining has faced financial and logistical obstacles that no company has yet overcome. NASA, for its part, is counting on the private sector to realize the U.S.’s space mining ambitions, then-deputy administrator Jim Morhard told dot.LA in 2020.
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Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Illumix Founder Kirin Sinha On Using Math to Inform Creative Thinking
Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
Kirin Sinha wanted to be a dancer. When injury dashed that dream, she turned to her other passion: math.
On this week’s episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast, host Yasmin Nouri talks with the founder and CEO of augmented reality (AR) technology and media platform Illumix.
Sinha received degrees from MIT, the University of Cambridge and LSE and founded a nonprofit to help middle school girls with their math skills. She ventured into AR while perusing an MBA at Stanford. Since founding Illumix in 2017, Sinha has raised $13 million from investors including Lightspeed and Maveron Ventures.
Her background in mathematics informs how she problem solves as a CEO, she said. Both math and her dance background taught her to seek out creative solutions.
“A lot of people think that math is very rote and analytical, but at its core it's truly not,” Sinha said. “It's about being creative. It's about having this building block for expressing and understanding the world around you.”
That creativity is bolstered by habits her mother taught her, such as surrounding herself with affirmations drawn onto post-it notes to bolster her spirits. Working in AR, Sinha said she's aware that what people surround themselves with impacts their inner world.
“Your diet is the people around you,” she said. “It's what you surround yourself with. It's the images and the words that surround your day-to-day life. I really spend a lot of time thinking about how can you improve the wider sense of the word diet around you.”
A crucial part of Sinha’s diet is carving out time for a daily walk to dedicate time to ponder Illumix’s future. Reflecting on big-picture goals and challenges allows her to consider how AR changes the ways people engage with the space around them.
Hear more of the Behind Her Empire podcast. Subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radioor wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
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Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.
Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.
Rael Raises $35M To Grow Its Organic Feminine Care Brand
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Rael, a Buena Park-based organic feminine care and beauty brand, has raised $35 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Wednesday.
The funding was led by the venture arms of two Asian companies: Japanese gaming firm Colopl’s Colopl Next and South Korean conglomerate Shinsegae Group’s Signite Partners. Aarden Partners and ST Capital also participated, as did existing investors Mirae Asset and Unilever Ventures.
Rael described the new round—which takes its total funding to date to $59 million—as “the largest amount raised in the U.S. feminine care category to date.” The company said it plans to use the capital to grow its product offerings, retail partnerships and global marketing reach.
Having already branched into skincare products meant to combat hormonal acne, co-founder and CEO Yanghee Paik said Rael plans on further expanding beyond basic feminine care products. “We aspire to be a clean, holistic personal care brand for women, so we’re graduating from just being another organic feminine care company,” Paik told dot.LA.
Paik and her two co-founders, who are all Korean-American women, launched Rael in 2017 and started out by selling organic pads on Amazon. Paik said she was inspired by the products she would bring back home after trips to South Korea, where the organic category represents more than 30% of the feminine care market (compared to less than 10% of the U.S. market, according to Rael). The startup has since expanded into retail stores like Target and Walmart, and part of its new funding will be dedicated to further growing its retail presence.
These days, Rael is part of an increasing number of companies focused on organic feminine care, with brands like LOLA, The Honey Pot and The Flex Co. all offering organic menstrual products.
“The feminine care industry is not like beauty, which attracted a lot of investors initially,” Paik said. “People are noticing that it’s one of the markets that has not been noticed by investors as much, but has a lot of growth potential because it’s been dominated by big brands. Now there are female-founded smaller brands that are trying to make a difference there.”
As part of Rael’s growth efforts, the company has also brought in Lauren Consiglio, a former marketing executive at Unilever and L’Oreal, as its president.
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Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.