Sherwood News

Could TikTok’s sister app, Lemon8, offer a lifeline for ByteDance and creators?

When life gives you laws you don’t like, push Lemon8.

1/9/25 11:55AM

Tomorrow marks one of the biggest days in recent history for ByteDance, and for the most screen-addicted Americans in your life, as representatives from the Chinese tech giant make last-ditch appeals to the Supreme Court to try to divert the US ban on the company’s flagship app, TikTok.

As things stand, a bipartisan bill signed off by Joe Biden last April means that the short-form social-media behemoth would be outlawed in the US on January 19 (next Sunday), unless ByteDance sells the platform to an American company, or the Supreme Court intervenes, or President-elect Donald Trump intervenes, or some as yet unknown outcome saves the app, which reportedly counts more than 170 million users in the US.

While a ban wouldn’t automatically wipe TikTok from those 170 million Americans’ devices before they could say the word “rizzler,” new users wouldn’t be able to download it, and a ban on updates would eventually make the platform practically unusable.

Public support for the ban, proposed due to safety concerns around sensitive user data, has been dwindling, with millions of Americans already looking to another ByteDance app as an alternative if the ban goes through.

According to data from site-traffic tracker Similarweb, more than 2.3 million unique visitors clocked just over 5 million page views on the landing page for Lemon8 in America last month. That number has grown as TikTok creators — some of whom are being paid to do so by ByteDance — push users to the photo- and video-sharing “lifestyle community” TikTok alternative, per Axios.

Though Lemon8, which launched in the US in early 2023 but didn’t take off in the same way as TikTok, might not be the safest port in this particular storm. Indeed, the divest-or-ban part of the bill reportedly applies to other properties owned or operated by ByteDance, meaning that even the replacement app’s future could be in peril.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5