--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, April 14th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, why the Social Security Administration is declaring some people dead falsely and on purpose. Higher ed institutions are doing disaster budgeting. And those tariff exemptions for smartphones and other electronics will be short-lived. But first, social media giant Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is in court starting today in a massive antitrust trial that could change the entire social media landscape.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: The Federal Trade Commission alleges the company violated antitrust laws when it acquired Instagram in 2012 and the messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lauren Feiner is a senior policy writer for The Verge, and she told us the government is arguing Meta with those acquisitions essentially became a monopoly.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: Meta ended up growing its dominance and cutting off what could have been really formidable competitors to its dominance, and that it did that in order to retain this power in the market so that no one else could really come up against it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The FTC cites a 2012 email in its argument where Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg names startups like Instagram as potentially disruptive to its business.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: Meta says the company always competes fairly and is facing punishment for its success in growing those apps into major players in the social media world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Feiner says the crux of the FTC's argument is that Meta monopolizes personal social networking services, a definition that will matter a lot in this case.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: The way the FTC views it, they basically say, look, there are this very tiny group of social networking apps that are really used just to connect with other people, to connect with friends and family. You use them differently than an app like YouTube or TikTok, where maybe you're primarily scrolling through and passively watching content.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: And you're also using it differently than like a LinkedIn, where you're really trying to use it to find a job or make career connections. This is really about personal social networking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meta sees the space differently. They say, you know, we really compete in this really vast and varied social media landscape that includes TikTok, that includes YouTube, that includes all of these other social media apps that really look a lot alike.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: It's important to point out that the acquisitions in question were vetted and cleared by the FTC more than a decade ago.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The government, however, now says Meta may not have been forthcoming during that process.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: As all of this is going on, Zuckerberg has sought to curry favor with President Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meta settled a previous lawsuit over the banning of Trump's accounts, and Zuckerberg reportedly made trips to Mar-a-Lago and the White House to personally lobby Trump to direct the FTC to drop this antitrust case.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: Feiner says it's yet to be seen whether or not that investment will pay off for Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs who have lobbied Trump.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: A recent decision against Google also matters here. A judge ruled that Google illegally monopolized the online search market, which could open the door for other important cases to go against big tech companies.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If Meta loses this case, the government could force it to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp into separate companies. They currently generate billions of dollars for Meta.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: For consumers, Feiner told us, it could mean potentially better social media platforms in the future.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The government would say that if they won, this could potentially open up the market for social media apps.
--:-- Lauren Feiner: And, you know, maybe if there's things you don't like about social media, maybe there'll be room for a new competitor to come in with a new idea that challenges certain features of social media that maybe wouldn't be able to get off the ground the way the market is right now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, Meta would obviously dispute that theoretical version of the future, but I think that's really what this whole case is about.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The trial is expected to last several weeks. Big-name current and former Meta executives like Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are expected to take the stand.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to several big changes at the Social Security Administration.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: Wired reports that the agency plans to move all public communications to Elon Musk's social media platform, X.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's raising questions and concerns considering many U.S. residents, particularly seniors who rely on this information to better understand their benefits, do not have accounts on the X platform.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: The agency called this claim false on X, but Wired says they stand by their reporting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Also at the Social Security Agency, The Washington Post is reporting a new Trump administration tactic targeting mostly Latino immigrants is cutting people off from benefits by purposely and falsely labeling them dead.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: At the request of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Social Security Administration entered the names and legally obtained social security numbers of more than 6,000 immigrants who entered the country during the Biden administration into a database that the agency uses to track and cancel benefits for dead people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That effectively canceled their Social Security numbers, meaning they could soon no longer have the ability to work legally in the United States, open bank accounts and credit cards, secure housing and more.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: You really do need a Social Security number to function in this country. And so their economic livelihoods could eventually be cut off.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Lisa Ryan, a federal government reporter for The Washington Post.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: She spoke with us about the White House's motivations for this move. They've said that these people are illegally getting benefits and are not here in the country legally and they want them to leave.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A White House official told The Post that the people whose social security numbers were canceled had ties to terrorist activity or had criminal records.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: Though Ryan told us they didn't provide evidence to support those claims.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They also said nearly 1,000 of these people were receiving benefits through Medicaid, 41 were collecting unemployment, and 22 had student loans.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: Ryan told us the administration move here is trying to push people to leave the country by cutting off their access to critical financial services.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The government knows that these people are alive. This is not an error but the government is willfully putting their names in a database where they know they should not be.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: So that's a violation of the Privacy Act, according to many experts we spoke with.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So that seems to be the biggest illegality about this.
--:-- Lisa Ryan: This represents a stunning turn in data privacy at the Social Security Administration, where under previous administrations, personal information had been closely guarded.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's just the latest example of the extraordinary measures Elon Musk and his Doge team have employed to access and share personal data that had historically been off-limits to immigration authorities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It comes on the heels of another unusual agreement that we talked about on this show, where the IRS recently agreed to share information with the Department of Homeland Security for undocumented immigrants.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In recent weeks, President Trump has tried to exert more influence on institutes of higher education by withholding financial support schools have relied on for decades.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: The Trump administration paused over $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It announced plans to pause an additional $790 million to Northwestern and more than $1 billion to Cornell.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: And it's threatened to cut $9 billion in contracts and grants at Harvard.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This money helps schools do things like keep the lights on at labs, pay salaries to educators and researchers, and fund research projects.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: Without it, much of that work comes to a halt.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At Northwestern, for example, researchers with federal grants received 100 stop work orders in recent days, which will impact studies related to Parkinson's disease, nanotechnology, and foreign military training.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over at the University of Missouri, Bloomberg reporter Elizabeth Rembert spoke to a researcher named Carrie Clark, who recently lost funding for a project that she spent a decade on that took up about a quarter of her work, developing machines to make harvesting processes for farmers in Africa more efficient.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: Farmers who are largely women would have to physically beat the soybean plants with sticks in order for the plants to release the soybeans.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: And that would take them a week, I think she said, to go through an acre, which is about the size of a football field.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: So she developed a threshing machine, is what they call it, which helps them mechanize the harvesting process.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: And now they're able to get through that same field size in just four hours.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Clark says losing her research funding, which came from USAID, felt like losing a child.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: And Rembert told us the impact of these kinds of funding cuts could hit far beyond college campuses.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: Cutting funding to the institutes that provide that funding to schools or proposing new caps on funding, That really imperils a lot of the economy in states where the university systems are a really big part of the jobs or the economies rely on those institutions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there are other ways higher ed institutions are being impacted by the administration through efforts to dismantle the Department of Education plans to raise endowment taxes threats to cut funding for schools that support transgender athletes or diversity initiatives and at schools where students and academics have been outspoken against the war in Gaza.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: This expert that I talked to for this article kind of called it like using a bazooka to swat down mosquitoes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Behind the scenes, colleges and universities are scrambling to figure out what they would do if a large chunk of their budget suddenly gets cut.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: An expert in higher ed told Rembert, administrators are likely working on two versions of their budgets right now.
--:-- Elizabeth Rembert: One that assumes the status quo stays, and another that's a, quote, disaster budget that accounts for losing government support.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
--:-- Shamita Basu: First, to the latest on tariffs.
--:-- Howard Lutnick: After the Trump administration said electronics like smartphones and computers would be exempt from steep tariffs on China, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick now says that move will be temporary.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that President Trump, in about a month or two, will impose a, quote, special focus type of tariff on those items.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Trump posted on social media that he is looking at the whole electronic supply chain.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He says the administration plans to target semiconductors and pharmaceuticals next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some significant developments in Gaza over the weekend.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Israel says it has completely encircled the city of Rafa on the border with Egypt and established a security zone separating it and the city of Khan Yunus.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu previously said Israel would create the corridor to put pressure on Hamas to release the remaining hostages being held.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The government in Rafa called the zone illegitimate and condemned the move.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Meanwhile, an Israeli strike destroyed part of a hospital in northern Gaza early yesterday, effectively incapacitating the last fully functioning hospital in Gaza City, as Israel's military operation continues to expand and intensify.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And a man in Pennsylvania has been charged with attempted murder, terrorism, and other offenses in connection with a fire set at Governor Josh Shapiro's residence.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Shapiro and his family were sleeping at the time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There were no injuries, but a significant amount of damage.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting the 38-year-old man turned himself in to police and told them he did it because he hated Shapiro and had intended to harm him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The incident occurred on the first night of Passover.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When asked if the fire is being investigated as a hate crime, state police told the Philadelphia Inquirer, quote, all avenues will be explored.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the news app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are just shy of 150 working payphones left in Los Angeles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And thanks to a pair of artists, one way that you can use them is to record a farewell message, to say goodbye to a loved one, or a thank you, or just to turn a new page.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's called The Goodbye Line.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the LA Times sat down with the creators of this project to learn more about their mission to make goodbyes less lonely.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
