Online misinformation about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and about the relief response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have surged in recent weeks, including false narratives of aid being withheld from victims for their political beliefs and aid being stolen by undocumented immigrants. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Ethan Porter, professor of media, public affairs and political science at George Washington University, about why there’s been so much misinformation about these natural disasters and FEMA’s relief response.

TikTok has a lot going on legally these days. Last week, it saw a fresh round of lawsuits alleging the short-form video app harms children. And then there’s the federal law that could ban the app if ByteDance, its China-based owner, doesn’t divest by January. TikTok has sued to block that law. Oral arguments in TikTok Inc. v. Merrick Garland were heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in September. The company is joined by eight TikTok creators as plaintiffs in the case, and one of them is Talia Cadet. She has nearly 140,000 followers on TikTok, where she produces lifestyle videos focused on her love of books and travel. She talked with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about the case.

TikTok is facing yet another legal challenge. This week, attorneys general from 13 states plus Washington, D.C., sued the short-form video app, alleging that it harms children. We’ll be digging into the latest lawsuits on today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” our roundup of the week’s top tech headlines. Like the so-called Godfather of AI who is sharing the Nobel Prize in physics. Plus, the U.S. government is weighing what to do about Google after its search business was ruled a monopoly earlier this year. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.

The new kid on the block of social media, Meta’s Threads, hit 200 million active users in August. When it launched in the summer of 2023 as a rival to the platform formerly known as Twitter, Meta said the app would eventually be integrated into the so-called fediverse. This “federated universe” is the most prominent example of a decentralized social network in which users can join any affiliated platform and interact with content from all the others. Recently, Meta took some steps to integrate Threads into this ecosystem, and Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer for The Washington Post, has been following the developments.

A lot of personal data – stuff like your home address, phone number, marital status and more – is out there on the internet. Anyone can buy it from sites like Whitepages, PeopleFinders or Intelius, which aggregate data from public records and social media. You can contact each of these “people search” sites and request they take down your information, but it’s a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. Naturally, a whole industry of data-removal services has sprung up. For a price, they promise to do the dirty work for you. But do they deliver? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Yael Grauer, a researcher at Consumer Reports, who recently looked into the efficacy of the data-removal industry.

Until about a decade ago, independent cybersecurity researchers in the U.S. weren’t allowed to examine voting machines for potential vulnerabilities. But that ban was essentially lifted in 2015. Two years later, DEF CON — one of the largest hacker conventions — decided to invite hackers, cybersecurity researchers and election officials to find those flaws during its annual Voting Village event. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Catherine Terranova, executive director of Voting Village, about how they balance the well-intentioned work of finding vulnerabilities before bad actors do and the problem of misinformation around the security of voting machines.

It’s been more than 15 years since the digital currency bitcoin was launched, going from a fringe phenomenon in the dark corners of the internet to an asset traded on Wall Street. But the identity of bitcoin’s creator, known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained a mystery wrapped in a cryptographic enigma. Now, investigative filmmaker Cullen Hoback may have cracked the case. His last HBO series “Into the Storm” uncovered the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory. In his new documentary, “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,” Hoback sets out to answer the elusive question: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? To prevent any spoilers, we’ll keep his conclusions secret.

Investors are once again pouring money into biotechnology startups. But this time, it feels different from the heyday of 2021. We’ll be digging into the latest data for today’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” our roundup of the week’s top headlines, including some you might have missed.

We’ll also talk about a private equity deal with the country’s biggest digital pharmacy platform. But first, OpenAI closes a historic funding round. The maker of ChatGPT raised another $6.6 billion — valuing the company at $157 billion, double its worth earlier this year.

Our regular contributor Christina Farr, managing director with Manatt Health, joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino to discuss the news.

All those fancy artificial intelligence systems need a lot of data centers to run, and those data centers need a lot of energy. One estimate from the Electric Power Research Institute suggests that current data center electricity consumption in the U.S. will more than double by 2030, making up about 9% of all energy use. But the AI sector is coming up against the big energy-hungry tech innovation of yesteryear: crypto mining. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Reuters reporter Laila Kearney about the scramble to power up in both industries.

Today we’re talking about voting tech and the push in some areas to move away from machines and go back to hand counting ballots. A legal battle is brewing in Georgia over a new rule requiring ballots be hand counted on election night to ensure the tally matches electronic records. Arizona has added a similar requirement. The issue has become particularly mired in misinformation in recent years, with some election deniers questioning the security of the tech used in our elections. While some may believe hand counts are more accurate, the number of jurisdictions across the country relying on them on election night has been steadily dropping. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Pam Smith, president and CEO of the nonpartisan organization Verified Voting, about why the practice of counting ballots by hand is waning.