Hillicon Valley — YouTube removes Jan. 6 panel video with Trump clip

YouTube announced Friday it had taken down a video released by the Jan. 6 House select committee that featured a clip of former President Trump making baseless claims about the election.

Meanwhile, the 5G rollout in the U.S. is facing further delays.

This is Hillicon Valley, detailing all you need to know about tech and cyber news from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley. Send tips to The Hill’s Rebecca Klar, Chris Mills Rodrigo and Ines Kagubare. Subscribe here.

YouTube takes down select committee’s video 

YouTube confirmed on Friday that it had removed a video uploaded by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot for violating the platform’s election integrity policy.

• “Our election integrity policy prohibits content advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, if it does not provide sufficient context,” Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, said in a statement.
  
• “We enforce our policies equally for everyone, and have removed the video uploaded by the January 6th Committee channel,” Choi added. 

The context: The video in question was a clip of a hearing that the committee conducted and posted to the video platform on Tuesday, The New York Times reported. 

Part of the video showed former President Trump baselessly claiming on Fox Business that “We had glitches where they moved thousands of votes from my account to Biden’s account,” according to the Times.

Read more here. 

Verizon, AT&T agree to (more) 5G delays 

AT&T and Verizon have agreed to delay the deployment of some of their 5G services until July 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced Friday. 

• The delay in C-Band 5G usage will give air carriers more time to update their planes to guarantee there will be no interference.
  
• The two carriers had previously agreed to delay switching on some wireless towers near airports until July 5 of this year. 

“We believe we have identified a path that will continue to enable aviation and 5G C-band wireless to safely co-exist,” Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen said in a statement Friday.

Read more here. 

TIKTOK SHIFTS US USERS TO ORACLE 

TikTok announced Friday that it has moved its data on users located in the United States to Oracle’s cloud platform, an attempt to assuage concerns about Chinese government access to American data. 

• Backups of U.S. user data will be stored in TikTok’s own servers in Virginia and Singapore for the time being before ultimately being deleted in the switch to Oracle’s platform.
  
• “These are critical steps, but there is more we can do,” the platform said in a blog post. “We know we are among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data.” 

Read more here. 

SENATE DEMS PUSH FOR COMMON CHARGERS

Senate Democrats are urging the Commerce Department to develop a plan that would allow consumers to use a common charger for mobile devices, following in the footsteps of a European Union law.  

• Democratic Sens. Ed Markey (Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Thursday asking the department to address the lack of interoperability among chargers. 
  
• The issue places a financial burden on consumers, forcing them to “frequently” pay for “new specialized charging equipment” for different devices. And it leads to environmental harm by producing electronic waste that can spread toxins when not disposed of properly, they wrote.  

Earlier this month, EU officials agreed to a rule that would require a common charging port for all mobile phones, tablets and cameras in the EU by 2024. 

Read more about the letter.  

SpaceX fires back

Private spacecraft engineering company SpaceX, run by Elon Musk, fired employees on Thursday who took part in disseminating a letter that criticized its founder and CEO.

Employees told The New York Times that those behind the letter, which they posted in a company messaging channel and circulated online on Wednesday, were investigated and asked to leave SpaceX.

“The letter, solicitations and general process made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views,” the company’s president and COO, Gwynne Shotwell, wrote in an email to employees obtained by the Times.

“We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.” 

Read more here.

BITS & PIECES

An op-ed to chew on: House Select Committee is giving Jan. 6 the ‘60 Minutes’ treatment 

Notable links from around the web: 

We warned Google that people might believe AI was sentient. Now it’s happening. (The Washington Post / Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell) 

Jay-Z’s bitcoin school met with skepticism in his former housing project: ‘I don’t have money to be losing’ (The Guardian / Wilfred Chan) 

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire (Recode / Jason Del Rey) 

Why the crypto crash hits different in Latin America (Rest of World / Leo Schwartz, Lucía Cholakian Herrera and Andrea Paola Hernández) 

One more thing: DOJ seizes hacking network

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it has dismantled a Russian network of hacked internet-connected devices in a coordinated effort with foreign counterparts to crack down on malicious cyber activities.

The DOJ said Thursday it worked with law enforcement agencies in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to take down the Russian botnet, known as RSOCKS.

• The network reportedly hacked millions of computers and other electronic devices around the world. 
  
• RSOCKs, a popular proxy service, illegally provided its users access to IP addresses linked to devices that had been hacked, authorities said. 

A message posted on the service’s website and viewed Friday confirmed that its domain had been seized by the DOJ. 

Read more here. 

That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out The Hill’s Technology and Cybersecurity pages for the latest news and coverage. We’ll see you next week.

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