UC Berkeley School of Information

In a historic development, Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok has become the center of a bipartisan bill to ban the app nationwide in the name of national security. Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a prominent scholar in the study of state censorship, propaganda, and disinformation in China, pointed to TikTok’s parent company ByteDance as the source of these national security fears. 

“If you let a primary geopolitical opponent collect extensive data on user locations and biometrics, then you create this vulnerability for national security…Ultimately, this is a problem of trust in a political system,” he stated. 

UC Berkeley School of Information assistant professor Niloufar Salehi has partnered with University of Southern California professor Afshin Nikzad and entrepreneur Steven Mih to launch Across AI, a startup pioneering agentic AI for complex enterprise workflows. The startup recently came out of stealth, announcing it had raised $5.75 million in a seed round of funding co-led by venture capital firms Cota Capital and Village Global.