• TikTok’s plan to base its international HQ in the UK has been thrown into doubt following pressure by the Whitehouse over the Chinese firm’s future in the US.
• ByteDance, the owner of the video-sharing app, has had talks with the government about basing its HQ in London.
• “We remain fully committed to investing in London,” said a ByteDance spokesman.
• The US is considering banning TikTok and may only allow it to keep operating if it splits from China and becomes an American company.
• Theo Bertram, TikTok’s Head of Public Policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said it would refuse any request from China to hand over data, saying “the suggestion that we are in any way under the thumb of the Chinese government is completely and utterly false”.

• Following last week’s reported security breach, Twitter has confirmed that hackers used tools that were supposed to have only been available to its own staff to carry off Wednesday’s hack attack.
• The breach used the accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Bill Gates,  and other celebrities to tweet a Bitcoin scam.
• Twitter also revealed the perpetrators had downloaded data from up to eight of the accounts involved. It declined to reveal their identities but said none of them were “verified”.
• In a statement, Twitter said, “we are continuing our investigation of this incident, working with law enforcement and determining longer-term actions we should take to improve the security of our systems.”

• Feuerkrieg Division (FKD) the third Neo-Nazi organisation to be proscribed as a terrorist group by the UK government in 6 months, targets young people online according to analysts at Counter Terrorism Policing.
• Analysts have warned that groups like FKD are increasingly targeting young people online with their rhetoric and propaganda.
• They promote their ideology online through the sharing of violent white supremacist propaganda, commonly using social media platforms to target young people aged between 13 and 25.  
• The groups often use mainstream social media platforms to post non-extreme information regarding popular or relatable topics, with the intention of engaging these younger audiences before encouraging them to migrate to less moderated platforms where they can share more graphic and extreme content.  

• Tech companies may be prevented from sending data back to the US after the latest ruling in a case at the court of justice of the European Union (CJEU) concluded that there are not enough protections against snooping by US intelligence agencies.
• The ruling will not apply immediately but requires data protection authorities (DPAs) in individual member states to vet the sending of any new data to make sure people’s personal information remains protected according to the EU’s data protection laws (GDPR).
• The case was started after Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems lodged an official complaint. He argued that the privacy of European citizens could not be guaranteed, following revelations from the Snowden affair.

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