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After the last evacuation flights left Afghanistan, Homayra Yusufis family was one of many that scrambled to file applications to help their loved ones reach safety in the United States.

Well over half a year later, Yusufis 10 family members, like thousands of others still in danger now that the Taliban has taken over, are still waiting for an answer from the U.S. government.

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More than 41,000 such applications which would allow them to enter the U.S. temporarily under a special program called humanitarian parole are still pending for Afghans, according to statistics provided by the Department of Homeland Security. Of the roughly 4,180 who have received responses so far, only 280 have been approved. The other 3,900, or about 93 percent, were denied.

We hear stories day in and day out about humanitarian parole applicants who are being killed by the Taliban, said Yusufi. Thats just a reality.

The Biden administration has used that same legal process humanitarian parole in a different program designed specifically for Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion of their country. It has moved substantially faster, and with fewer requirements, to quickly grant Ukrainians entry to the United States.

More than 40,000 applications for the Uniting For Ukraine program have been approved since it was created in late April, according to DHS. More than 8,600 Ukrainians have already been paroled into the United States through that effort.

For Yusufi and others, the ease with which Ukrainians have been able to flee to the United States is evidence that their loved ones cases couldve been handled much differently and expediently by the U.S. government.

This demonstrates that when theres a political will, theres a way, said San Diego-based Yusufi. Its great that the Ukrainians are seeking safety and actually finding it. Thats amazing. I wish that other communities were treated similarly.

When asked about the disparity, a DHS spokesperson who spoke on the record but declined to be named pointed to the Afghans who were evacuated as U.S. troops withdrew in August.

The United States swiftly welcomed more than 79,000 Afghans through Operation Allies Welcome, an unprecedented historic effort, providing them with work authorization, immigration benefits, and other support as they begin their new lives in America and we are prepared to welcome additional Afghans over the coming weeks and months, the official said. We also continue to honor the Presidents commitment to Ukrainians fleeing Russias unprovoked war. More than 40,000 Ukrainian nationals have been authorized to travel to the United States to apply for parole since the launch of the Uniting for Ukraine process in April.

Yusufi, who was born in Afghanistan and has been in the United States since the early 1990s, works as deputy director of Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, a nonprofit that supports and empowers refugees and former refugees in the San Diego area. As U.S. troops left Afghanistan, she got involved with organizations and collectives trying to support Afghans grappling with the aftermath, and those left behind. In both roles, as well as in her personal life, Yusufi has kept a close watch on humanitarian parole applications as the picture grows bleaker.

The disparity in treatment, from Yusufis perspective, is a symptom of much broader issues with the way the United States handles situations of forced displacement around the world.

With few options left to them, some Afghans are deciding to try to make it to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek protection that way. The group is small relative to other nationalities seeking asylum at the southwest border Customs and Border Protection officers at ports of entry and Border Patrol agents together encountered 166 Afghans trying to come to the United States without documents so far in 2022, according to data provided by the agency. But that is more than double the total for all of 2021.

More than a hundred supporters, many of them Afghan, marched from the San Diego County Administration building to show their support for the Afghanistan National Resistance Front, an anti-Taliban military alliance, on Sept. 18, 2021.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Humanitarian parole has been used for decades to allow people into the United States quickly when they do not have visas to do so otherwise. Under the law, the reason can be for significant public benefit or humanitarian purposes.

In individual cases, that could mean a relative coming to the United States for a couple of weeks to attend a funeral or say goodbye to a dying loved one. Or, it could be someone needing to receive life-altering medical treatment only available in the U.S.

Generally, the person requesting parole must have a sponsor who agrees to cover any necessary costs during the persons visit including housing, food and medical care. There is also a $575 fee per person not per family. The applicant can request a fee waiver, but that can slow down the process, particularly if the waiver is denied.

Humanitarian parole has also been used in situations when groups of people need to be brought to the United States, often in association with military operations, according to Margaret Stock, a retired lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Army who is now an immigration attorney.

Humanitarian parole was used in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Stock said. She also recalled the military using it to evacuate military family members from the Philippines when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the early 1990s.

Before the special immigrant visa program was created by Congress which allows people who worked for the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq to get green cards the Department of Defense would frequently request that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services parole such individuals who were in danger and needed to flee the country, Stock said.

Months before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Stock testified in Congress that humanitarian parole would be the only way to quickly bring people to safety. As U.S. troops evacuated tens of thousands of Afghans in August, U.S. officials used humanitarian parole to give them temporary permission to enter the country.

Its a standard part of U.S. military planning for military operations to do mass evacuations involving parole, Stock said. The only legal authority thats fast is parole, so thats what they always use.

But in the case of Afghans, once U.S. troops pulled out, access to parole went with them.

In late August, USCIS set up a special website detailing how Afghans who had not been evacuated could apply for humanitarian parole.

Not wanting to risk delaying the applications because of the imminent danger their loved ones were in, families like Yusufis scraped together the money to pay the fees. For Yusufis family, that meant paying $5,750 to cover the 10 applications.

But they did not get the responses they anticipated.

According to allegations in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts on behalf of five other families, USCIS paused processing Afghan applications from early September to sometime in November. Then, USCIS adopted new, stricter standards that meant the vast majority of those applications would be denied, the federal complaint says.

Among the issues, USCIS decided that it could not process applications for Afghans still in Afghanistan because the U.S. consulate there was closed, and USCIS wanted them to have consular interviews where they would be fingerprinted and receive additional vetting as part of their screenings. But when some applicants tried traveling to Pakistan or Iran so that they could go to the U.S. consulates there, they were told that they were no longer in imminent danger and didnt qualify.

Ukrainian refugees are bused from the Deportivo Benito Juarez shelter to the Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana to enter the U.S. on April 6, 2022. Under a new program, Ukrainians dont need to ask for protection at the U.S.-Mexico border but can apply while in other countries and fly directly to the U.S.

(Carlos Moreno/For The San Diego Union-Tribune)

However, under the Uniting for Ukraine program, Ukrainians can apply from Ukraine or elsewhere in the world. They do not have to pay any fees. They also do not have to go to consulates to get their paperwork; instead, it is emailed to them.

The most difficult part of the process for many Ukrainians is finding sponsors. Volunteers have set up Facebook groups to help U.S.-based families willing to sign the sponsorship forms to match with waiting Ukrainians.

Some Americans hesitated to sign the forms because of the potential financial responsibilities if, for example, someone is injured and has to go to an emergency room. But recently, Congress passed a bill that makes Ukrainians eligible for certain financial benefits, including Medicaid, that refugees typically receive for their first months in the United States. That lessens the financial obligations for sponsors.

Once Ukrainians find sponsors, the process often takes a matter of days.

The administration keeps creating a new program a new program for these people, a new program for these people, and theyre really all stopgap measures, Yusufi said. They demonstrate the inequities and racism within our immigration system rather than creating an equitable system that is sustainable and thorough and provides the actual long-term support that people fleeing from violence and fleeing for their lives need.

The big difference, said Laila Ayub an immigration attorney and cofounder of Project ANAR, an emergency response project to assist Afghans is that Uniting for Ukraine takes into account that Ukrainains are fleeing and in crisis while the Afghan parole process does not.

"(Uniting for Ukraine) just showed us all of the demands we have been making have been possible to implement, and theres not really a clear explanation for why the government hasnt done so yet, Ayub said.

A man from Ukraine sits among donated toys at a shelter in the Christian church Calvary San Diego for arriving Ukrainians on April 1, 2022.

(Gregory Bull / Associated Press)

Shala Gafary, managing attorney of Project Afghan Legal Assistance for Human Rights First, sees several layers of reasons to explain why the U.S. government treats Ukrainians and Afghans fleeing their countries so differently.

There are the more obvious layers of racism in U.S. immigration policies, as well as in how the people fleeing are perceived by the public and the corresponding pressure for the government to react, when considering various humanitarian crises. But Gafary also points to the fact that Afghans have been fleeing their country for generations, adding to an indifference from the rest of the world.

The longer youre a marginalized, oppressed, targeted population, the more people get sick of you, and so the new population that people feel really sorry for because they, just yesterday, were shopping on Amazon or those silly lines that the media was using theres not the same empathy for them, Gafary said. The longer youre in conflict, the less people feel for you. Its really sad.

But the results of that indifference can be deadly.

A man identified in the Massachusetts lawsuit as Rasul applied for humanitarian parole for six of his family members in Afghanistan. He had already come to the United States after working for the military and had become a U.S. citizen.

He knew that because of his work, as well as that of several of the family members, they would likely be targeted by the Taliban.

If the community sees one family member as disloyal due to their connections to the United States, the entire family carries the perceived stain, the complaint explains.

As their parole applications languished, three of those family members were killed. Rasuls attorney notified USCIS and pushed for the agency to expedite the three surviving family members cases, the complaint says. But they are still waiting.

Adriana Lafaille, the ACLU staff attorney representing the five families in the lawsuit, including Rasuls, said that shes working to expedite the case as much as possible because she knows that the longer it takes, the higher the chances that more plaintiffs will be killed.

Its a continuing concern for us, Lafaille said. We have clients who are in hiding, and every day we worry about what will happen if theyre found.

And despite USCISs assertions that those who have made it to Iran or Pakistan are no longer in imminent danger, Gafary and other attorneys maintain that is not the case.

Gafary said she applied for roughly two dozen of her own family members to receive humanitarian parole. Among them, one of her cousins and his wife are both doctors trained by the United States, making them more likely to be targeted. To make matters worse, their high school-age son was kidnapped a few months before the Taliban took over the country. Though the police of the then-government caught and imprisoned the kidnappers, when the Taliban took control, the kidnappers went free.

Without any movement on their parole applications, Gafarys cousin and his family fled to Iran, where they are living undocumented and worry that they could be deported to their deaths at any moment. Iranians also discriminate against Afghans frequently, Gafary said.

Afghan children cant go to school with Iranian children, Gafary said. They get called garbage and filth every day on the street.

FILE - Families evacuated from Kabul, Afghanistan, walk through the terminal to board a bus after they arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport, in Chantilly, Va., Sept. 1, 2021.

(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

In a denial letter to an Afghan humanitarian parole applicant reviewed by the Union-Tribune, USCIS said that humanitarian parole is not intended to be used in place of the international refugee protection regime or resettlement through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.

The U.S. response to refugee situations hinges on two processes, both created in the 1980 Refugee Act.

The first requires someone fleeing their country to go to a country where they can be recognized officially as a refugee through a screening process operated either by that country or the United Nations. Then, they go through years of additional screening and waiting to see if they will be resettled in the United States.

In the 1950s and 60s, the world, through the United Nations, established such refugee systems because of what happened to Jewish migrants fleeing the Nazi regime the same systems cited in the letter from USCIS that it said humanitarian parole is not meant to replace.

But while the Biden administration has promised to bring up to 125,000 new refugees to the United States this fiscal year, which ends in September, only about 12,600 have been allowed to arrive and begin new lives here, according to data from the State Department.

The other process is the asylum system the United States screening process to identify refugees who show up at its borders.

But accessing that asylum system generally requires getting physically onto U.S. soil, which is especially tricky for Afghans.

People from countries near the United States can move by land on often dangerous journeys to the border. And those in many other countries around the world can fly to somewhere in the Americas that doesnt require visas for their nationality and make that same trek.

But nearly every country in the world requires visas from Afghans, Gafary said, precisely because they have been refugees for so long.

Visa denials were also a big part of what Jewish migrants faced during the Holocaust. As a result, many were trapped in the places where they were being killed.

One family of Afghans facing threats from the Taliban managed against the odds to make it to the U.S.-Mexico border. But that was not enough to find protection in the United States.

Their relative, who is already a U.S. citizen after receiving a special immigrant visa for helping the military, had tried to sponsor their humanitarian parole applications, but they gave up on waiting in Afghanistan as their situation grew dire and headed to the Texas border to try, according to Stock, the attorney and retired military officer.

Twice, they were turned away from the United States at a port of entry, Stock said, with officials citing Title 42, a policy that has kept thousands from seeking asylum since the pandemic began.

While the family remains in Mexico and is unsure of their next steps, there may well be more Afghans who choose to try that path because they, too, are out of options.

Go here to read the rest:
Afghans face insurmountable challenges in fleeing to U.S., a stark contrast to arriving Ukrainians - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Chris Thompson-Lang spent 14 years in the military as a combat engineer, completing deployments in East Timor and Afghanistan.

It was an experience that would expose him to great harm and leave him indelibly changed.

"In Afghanistan, I was involved in the detection and removal of improvised explosive devices IEDs," he says.

Whenever an IED detonated, causing harm to those in the vicinity, Thompson-Lang felt responsible because he hadn't removed the device in time.

The trauma caused by witnessing injury and death among the people he was there to help had a lasting impact on his psychological state.

Thompson-Lang was eventually diagnosed with PTSD, major depressive disorder, substance misuse and alcohol misuse.

"It was yoga that brought me out of that," says Thompson-Lang, who retrained as a yoga teacher after he left the armed forces in 2015.

Typical responses to trauma include fight, flight or freeze, explains Thompson-Lang.

Studies using MRI imaging show how trauma either a one-off event or accumulative exposure alters the brain.

Changes to the amygdala the brain's "alarm centre" can heighten sensitivity to perceived threats.

Trauma can also diminish activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with executive functioning such as planning and decision-making.

"You've got oxygen, glucose [and] blood flow being redirected from the outer cortex in the brain into the central limbic system where you have the amygdala," says Thompson-Lang.

"It's really just the brain prioritising survival. Rationalising, logic, thinking, complex problem-solving become less important in a threat situation."

This state of hypervigilance has damaging health consequences.

"You're more often in fight and flight [modes], and that is driven by adrenaline and cortisol," Thompson-Lang explains.

"The production of the cortisol takes away from the body's ability to produce testosterone and oestrogen, and they're hormones that are required for health, growth and restoration."

All this means that yoga can be tremendously beneficial for people recovering from trauma but it might look a bit different from what you'd expect.

Walk into a regular yoga class and you'll often be greeted by music and the scent of essential oils wafting through the space.

During the class, your teacher might gently move your body to correct your posture.

A trauma-aware yoga class is different.

"We take a lot of stuff out of trauma-aware yoga, [for example]strong sensory inputs like oil, incense, candles, music, and we don't touch the participants," Thompson-Lang says.

To lead a trauma-aware yoga class, the teacher must understand the way trauma impacts the brain and the body, and "how those changes drive the way that the nervous system responds to sensory inputs or stimuli," he says.

"What we know about people who have experienced trauma is that their perception of threat changes. We're trying to reduce potential for triggering a stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system or the flight and fight response."

As well as removing potentially triggering stimuli, trauma-aware yogasupports participants in their recovery.

"By targeting the breath and using the breath to calm the nervous system, using movements that stimulate the circulation of hormones throughout the body, it gives the body the ability to heal," says Thompson-Lang.

"Not only physical injuries but also rewiring or undoing some of the damage that may have happened to the brain as a result of the traumatic experience."

"If you were to breathe in and never breathe out, that's what trauma is like," says Hannah Perkins, a trauma-aware yoga therapist who runs Love This Moment in Newcastle, New South Wales.

Perkins, who offers one-on-one sessions and group classes, says we accumulate stress in our bodies.

Unrelieved stress "can lead to chronic pain or psychological problems," she says. "Yoga is a practice that continually allows us to make contact with the body, relieve some of that stress and tensionand let it go."

Perkins is very conscious about creating a safe space for her clients.

"I very rarely put hands on people but if I were to, I would always ask for consent and check if that'sOK with the person," she says.

"I always offer suggestions rather than cues or instructions, and I'm always very invitational in my language, saying things like, 'you may like to do this'."

Perkins says for many, yoga is the ticket to peace and self acceptance.

"What I see in all my classes is people learning to love the body they're in and the life they have, starting to appreciate the present moment, not being locked in their fears or thoughts about the past, but also not feeling as threatened by the uncertainty of the future."

Like Thompson-Lang, Perkins was drawn to trauma-aware yoga through experiencing trauma herself. She grew up in a violent household, and she also underwent treatment for cancer in her twenties.

"Yoga practice has been a huge part of my healing," she says.

Today, yoga is part of Perkins' daily routine, "whether it's a full hour-long practice or ... it might be 10 minutes chanting in the bathroom."

She says she feels the best she has ever felt, even in the wake of two years made challenging by the pandemic.

"I wouldn't be able to live without this practice in my life because when something does happen that's stressful or challenging, I have tools and I'm aware enough to know that I need to do something to counter-balance that energy that's locked in the body."

When he came backfrom Afghanistan, Thompson-Lang struggled to adjust to life back in Australia.

The sound of his children crying triggered panic and disturbing flashbacks.

"I was at the point when I couldn't even be around my kids because if they were distressed at all, I would go into full fight and flight mode, and I just needed to get out," he says.

His family life suffered, and his marriage broke down.

Living alone in Canberra, he was drinking a lot. "Basically, I was working, drinking, sleeping, working, drinking, sleeping," he says.

One day, he was on his way to the pub with just $20 left in his pocket before the next payday.

"I was genuinely concerned that $20 wasn't enough to get me drunk enough to be able to sleep," he recalls. "I knew I needed to try something new."

At that moment, he spotted a sign on the street advertising 10 days of yoga for $20. "I walked in and that was it," he says.

"That first class was amazing. All I could focus on was the instructor, trying not to snap myself and trying to stay balanced. At the end of it, I went home and slept a little bit better, and I went back the next day."

Thompson-Lang finished the 10-day trial and signed up for another six months. "I bought myself a yoga mat, so I was pretty serious then," he says. "It pulled me out of such a bad place."

Thompson-Lang was eventually diagnosed with PTSD after a stint in hospital and received a medical discharge from the military.

He found the transition back to civilian life difficult. "It's challenging for everyone," he says. "We're in the middle of a Royal Commission into veteran suicide, right, and that was the reality for me at one point."

A lack of direction plus uncertainty around family and finances left him feeling dangerously low. "I got to the point when I seriously considered taking my life," he says.

"When I came out of hospital, when I couldn't work, the routine of going to yoga is what kept me going."

Through yoga, he learned to calm his nervous system.

"If I noticed I was starting to get a little bit heightened because of [my kids] crying or other sensory inputs, yoga gave me the tools to first notice it, and then to be able to do something with it using my breath, using postural alignment, using gentle stretching."

As a result, he was able to regain a relationship with his children, who are now 13 and 11.

He also believes yoga helped him overcome a cognitive impairment caused by his traumatic experiences in Afghanistan.

"I couldn't read a sheet of paper and remember what I'd read. I had to go back to the top, and it was extremely frustrating," he says. "It prevented me from being able to do anything effectively in my role as a leader in the military."

Now, he says, "I've regained that cognitive capacity and I'm back, leading a workforce larger than I ever have in the medical field."

In 2016, Thompson-Lang helped start Frontline Yoga, an organisation that provides support to first responders, emergency services and current and former members of the armed forces.

Frontline Yoga has recently announced a partnership with Invictus Australia as the organisation's official yoga provider, contributing activities to the ZERO600 fundraising and wellbeing campaign.

Thompson-Lang says yoga can serve as a valuable precursor to talk therapyfor people exposed to occupational trauma.

"If you're in that state of fight and flight, the brain's not functioning the way it normally does and it's hard to dig into complex problems without first addressing what's happening with the nervous system and bringing that part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, back online to be able to engage effectively with a therapist."

He says several of his yoga students have revealed that, like him, "they were contemplating suicide because of the level of distress and unease that was in their body.

"They said, 'you saved my life'. That's what drives us forward."

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Posted18 Jun 202218 Jun 2022Sat 18 Jun 2022 at 8:00pm, updated18 Jun 202218 Jun 2022Sat 18 Jun 2022 at 10:54pm

Continued here:
Chris Thompson-Lang came home from Afghanistan with PTSD. He says yoga saved his life - ABC News

Press Release Save The Children

New Zealanders are being asked to stand alongside girls in Afghanistan, many of whom are still struggling to access education since the transition of power last August. More than two months on from the Taliban extending its ban on secondary school

New Zealanders are being asked to stand alongside girls in Afghanistan, many of whom are still struggling to access education since the transition of power last August.

More than two months on from the Taliban extending its ban on secondary school girls attending classes, a new online campaign launched by Save the Children New Zealand asks Kiwis to share a message of hope for girls in Afghanistan.

Already, hundreds of Kiwis have signed up through the online portal, sending messages asking girls to stay strong: I want you to remember this, says one. Nothing stays the same, everything changes. Reach for the stars. You are important, your thoughts and feelings are valued.

To a special girl across the world from me, says another. Dont ever give up.

Save the Children Chief Executive Heidi Coetzee says education is a lifeline for all children, especially girls.

Without it they are at increased risk of violence, abuse and exploitation. There are many reasons why girls cannot access education in Afghanistan. Cultural traditions and womens role in society are the biggest challenges. Insecurity, poverty, poor infrastructure, inadequate learning materials and a lack of qualified female teachers are other barriers.

Our messages of hope provides a way to stand in solidarity with the girls in Afghanistan who are struggling to access their basic right to education and to show these girls they are not forgotten.

Ms Coetzee says the messages will be translated and delivered through a virtual platform to girls currently attending Save the Childrens community-based education classes. To ensure children still have access to education during the last 10 months, Save the Children has been running these classes and providing children and teachers with learning and classroom kits. The organisation has also been working with female secondary school graduates to support them to become teachers and to pass the university entrance exam.

It is now more than two months since the Taliban extended its ban on secondary school girls attending school. An analysis by Save the Children, UNICEF and its education cluster partners released last month showed the majority of secondary school girls around 850,000 out of 1.1 million were not attending classes.

Ms Coetzee says Save the Children is calling on the Taliban to allow girls of all ages back to school.

There is no issue that can justify the continuation of a policy that denies girls access to education. All children should have the chance to go to school, to learn and contribute to society.

To send a message of hope, go to: https://bit.ly/SCNZMessagesofHope

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nzOriginal url

Original post:
Community Scoop Reach For The Stars, You Are Important: Kiwis Send Messages Of Support To Girls In Afghanistan - Scoop

ByteDance Ltd.'s TikTok app is displayed in the App Store on a smartphone in an arranged photograph taken in Arlington, Virginia.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

TikTok is fully aware that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is retooling the Facebook and Instagram apps to be more like its own popular short video service. But TikTok has no interest in mimicking Facebook.

"Facebook is a social platform," Blake Chandlee, TikTok's president of global business solutions, told CNBC in an interview on Thursday. "They've built all their algorithms based on the social graph. That is their core competency. Ours is not."

Chandlee, who spent 12 years at Facebook before joining TikTok in 2019, said his former employer will likely run into trouble if it tries to copy TikTok, and will end up offering an inferior experience to users and brands.

Facebook launched Instagram Reels in 2020 as its first real foray into the short-form video market. Last year, it brought the service over to its core Facebook app.

"We are an entertainment platform," Chandlee said. "The difference is significant. It's a massive difference."

Facebook app chief Tom Alison told The Verge this week he sees TikTok increasingly stealing share from the world's largest social network. Facebook plans to modify its primary feed to look more like TikTok by recommending more content regardless of whether it's shared by friends.

"I think the thing we probably didn't fully embrace or see is how social this format could be," Alison told The Verge.

Facebook's recent performance backs that up. Meta's stock price is down 52% this year, underperforming the Nasdaq, which has dropped 32%. In April, the company said revenue in the second quarter could drop from a year earlier for the first time ever.

Earlier in the year, Zuckerberg acknowledged the increased competitive pressure from TikTok and said, "This is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long term."

TikTok is owned by China's ByteDance, which is privately held.

Chandlee said history is not on Zuckerberg's side, and compares its current problem to the challenge that Google faced when it was trying to take on Facebook at its own game.

"You remember when Google was creating Google+," Chandlee said. At Facebook, "We had war rooms at the time. It was a big deal. Everyone was worried about it," he said.

But no matter how much money Google poured into its social-networking efforts, it couldn't compete with Facebook, which had become the default place for people to connect with friends and share photos and updates.

"It became clear Google's value was search and Facebook was really good at social," Chandlee said.

"I see the same thing now," he added. "We're really good at what we do. We bring out these cultural trends and this unique experience people have on TikTok. They're just not going to have that on Facebook unless Facebook entirely walks away from its social values, which I just don't think it will do."

Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chandlee added that he has deep respect for Zuckerberg and views both Facebook and Google as strong competition. However, he noted that TikTok has an array of competitors across the world, including businesses in e-commerce and live streaming.

Chandlee said he hasn't seen a slowdown in ad spending on TikTok, despite what's being reported by companies such as Snap, which told investors that ad revenue is being hurt by inflation and the threat of recession. Snap's stock has lost almost three-quarters of its value this year.

"I've heard there's going to be a slowdown in the ad market, anywhere from 2% to 6%, but we have not seen it," Chandlee said. "We're not seeing the headwinds that some others are seeing."

WATCH: Snap has a TikTok problem, says Lead Edge Capital's Mitchell Green

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TikTok exec: We're not a social network like Facebook, we're an entertainment platform - CNBC

BeReal, LiveIn, Locket what do these new consumer social apps have in common besides a highly ranked position on the App Stores Top Charts? They engage their users through a combination of push notifications and homescreen widgets, instead of forcing people to spend a long time browsing their app, scrolling feeds or watching creator content.

The popularity of this homescreen-based form of social networking is, in part, tied to Apples move to launch a widgets platform for the iPhone with the release of iOS 14 in 2020. In doing so, it invited a new ecosystem of apps to emerge.

Initially, this began with apps that allowed users to better personalize their homescreens with widgets and custom app icons that matched their backgrounds, sending apps like Widgetsmith, Brass, Color Widgets and others to the top of the App Store. But over time, developers realized that widgets didnt just have to be homescreen decorations they could, in effect, be an active extension of their own platforms. Their widgets could serve as a tool to engage users in the most personal space on a mobile device: the prime real estate that is the phones homescreen.

When Locket first launched in December 2021, this idea was more of a novelty.

Developer and former Apple WWDC student scholarship winner Matt Moss thought it would be clever to use a widget to send photos to his girlfriend as they embarked on a long-distance relationship. But soon, his friends were clamoring for access to the app he had built as a simple side project.

Since then, Locket has expanded from iOS to Android and has now seen a total of 20 million installs to date, according to estimates from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. But its popularity has declined a bit as competitors emerged. While Locket was No. 9 in the Social Networking category, as of the time of writing, it was only No. 42 Overall on the U.S. App Store. That rank is largely due to the fact that there are so many other apps now playing in this space and gaining momentum.

For instance, another app called BeReal had originally arrived in December 2019 before iPhones widgets became broadly available. This social app encourages users to capture a photo within two minutes of receiving a push notification using BeReals camera which takes both a front-facing photo and selfie at the same time. The idea is to give users a way to see what their friends are up to in real time. Before this year, BeReal had seen steady, but not groundbreaking, growth, achieving 1.9 million worldwide installs, per Sensor Tower data. The app is backed by $30 million in funding, led by a16z, Accel and New Wave.

Then, in February 2022, BeReal tapped into the idea to leverage the homescreen to capture friends reactions to users posts, with the launch of a feature called WidgetMojis. This addition allowed BeReal to display friends photos in a live-updating widget on the homescreen as they reacted to users BeReal posts, or what BeReal calls RealMojis. By April, the app intelligence firm Apptopia had reported that BeReal had grown its monthly active users 315% year-to-date and that 65% of its lifetime downloads had occurred this year. That figure has since grown to around 86%, Sensor Tower says, as the app now has a total of 13.9 million lifetime installs.

Over the course of 2022, BeReals popularity has skyrocketed. This year alone BeReal has gained some 12 million installs, the data further indicates. And, as of the time of writing, BeReal was the No. 10 Overall app on the U.S. App Store, beating out traditional social networking and communication apps like Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram, Discord, Twitter and Pinterest. It was also the No. 3 app in the Social Networking category.

For younger users, BeReal also become part of their cultural lexicon and everyday app rotation. On TikTok, the hashtag #bereal has more than 390 million views, while variations on the name bring in thousands or millions more.

But BeReal is now only one of many competing in this space. Another vying for a part of this emerging market is the newer addition, LiveIn, which launched in January 2022 after pivoting from a Clubhouse-like app, Livehouse. This homescreen social networking app comes with its own twist. Instead of just sending selfie photos to friends phones, users can send videos and drawings, as well. Another new feature lets users duet photos and videos taking a cue from the similarly named mashup feature found on TikTok.

The company said in a press release it reached 4 million monthly active users in the first two months after launch. At the time, the hashtags #liveinapp and #livepic had generated more than 40 million TikTok views. Today, #liveinapp has 279.5 million TikTok views and #livepic has 37.6 million.

In addition to the casual photo sharing and updated widgets, these new social apps include a photo archive so users can look back at their memories. This serves not only as a way to incentivize users to launch the apps outside of designated photo-taking times, but also as a way to lock in users and keep them from abandoning the platform.

This sort of photo archive isnt a new concept its inspired by Facebook and Snapchats Memories features, but is designed to achieve the same results with a younger crowd.

In fact, these new social apps have taken many of the core concepts more recently popularized by Snapchat access to real-life friends, private photo sharing, spontaneous and casual photo taking and memories and have built their own differentiated platforms that tap into the smartphones notification system and direct homescreen access via widgets.

These three apps are only a handful of a growing number of apps building for social via the phones homescreen widgets.

Other top downloaded apps include Noteit Widget, which has gained 18.8 million lifetime installs per Sensor Tower data; Loveit: Live Pic & Note Widget (1.4 million installs); Widgetshare (3.1 million installs); Peek (704K installs); WidgetPal (374K installs), SnapWidget (185K installs); Rocket Widget (127K installs); Comet: Live Friends Widget (112K installs); and others.

There are even clones capitalizing on the names of popular brands like the not-so-subtly named app called LivePic, Locket Photo Widgets which has managed to pull in 79,000 installs some of which likely came by way of misdirected App Store searches.

Another one of the many things these apps have in common is that they promote sharing real-life photos that dont involve heavy editing, filters or AR effects features Snapchat and Instagram had become known for. This speaks to a broader shift thats helping fuel this trend: the end of the Instagram aesthetic and the increased desire for authenticity on social media.

We already saw hints of this emerging with the launches of other newcomer social photo apps like Dispo or Poparazzi, both of which focused on uncurated photostreams the latter, where photos were snapped and posted by the users friends, not users themselves. There were also the apps that aimed at photographers abandoned by Instagram like Glass, or Herd Social, which had positioned themselves as being anti-Instagram apps.

This group of photo apps promoted their defiance of Big Tech with its manufactured algorithms, the overabundance of features and the hyper-competitiveness that now sees mainstream social networks chasing TikTok with short videos, not to mention their collective drive to incorporate all sorts of other activity like e-commerce, creator subscriptions, virtual tipping, NFTs and more. When its not trying to be an online mall, Instagram is trying to clone TikTok, for example. Snapchat is hosting creator content and now wants users to shop using AR.

Meanwhile, younger users the key demographic that uses social apps seemed to have actually just wanted simpler apps that focused on what they think social networking should be about: their friends.

Its funny that its come to this. The social graph was once the holy grail of consumer social platforms to know who someone was connected to in real life was perceived as valuable data. For one thing, it meant you could lock users into a walled garden they wouldnt want to leave because their friends were all there, too. And making this social graph inaccessible to competitors meant every new network had to start from scratch. But these days, mainstream social networks are more heavily focused on connecting users with creators after all, thats where the money is. Users can subscribe to, shop from and virtually tip content creators. Monetizing true friendships is much more difficult.

But Big Techs greed left a gap in the market where they began to underserve those in search of real-world connections. This impact isnt just visible within the homescreen social app trend.

Its also helped drive users to the almost too numerous to count friend-finding and friend discovery apps, like Yubo, LMK, Wink, Hoop, Wizz, Vibe, Fam, Itsme, Lobby, Hippo, LiveMe, Swiping and others many of which had built on top of Snapchats APIs until the company tightened its developer policy over child safety concerns.

The trend is similarly impacting dating, leading to Matchs biggest-ever acquisition of Hyperconnect for $1.73 billion, which had been building social discovery apps that werent designed specifically for romantic connections. And Bumble today is beefing up its BFF feature as younger people are shifting their interest to friend-finding apps.

But this shift in social isnt without concerns. Though mainstream social apps are now being held accountable regarding their user protections, newer social apps are flying under the radar. Parents havent heard of these new apps and dont know to monitor or restrict them as a result. The same goes for lawmakers and regulators, too, who have their eyes affixed solely on tech giants. And as reports have shown, the apps privacy protections and policies, in some cases, are fairly weak. This is particularly concerning given that many are marketed toward and used by tweens and younger teens, who may inadvertently post to global, public feeds instead of to friends, post inappropriate content or become the victims of cyberbullying.

But the apps freewheeling nature isnt the only reason why homescreen social networking is having a moment. Beyond those mentioned above, there are many other factors at play here including the apps clever use of TikTok to drive downloads, influencer marketing and college ambassador programs to spread the word about new apps more organically. Theres also the continuous background noise related to social networkings ill effects that Gen Z is aware of, even if only mariginally. Data scandals, high-profile leaks and whistleblowing, Congressional hearings, regulatory inquiries and the resulting media coverage have helped fuel consumer demand for apps that werent created by todays dominant players.

The markets readiness for this type of networking is demonstrated by how well these homescreen social apps are currently doing. Theyre dominating the Social Networking charts and are staking their position in the Overall Top Charts. While, longer-term, they could end up being another flash in the pan the way location-based social networking apps were in the 2010s, theres a sense that some Gen Z users no longer consider these apps experimental.

And while TikTok is certainly a viable threat in terms of capturing the valuable and profitable connection between users and creators, users social graphs are still up for grabs. In fact, many among Gen Z dont want to share their real-world relationships with TikTok, theyve said in videos posted to the platform. They appreciate that TikTok is a network thats about creativity and individualized interests, not their real-world connections.

TikTok has realized this too, and understands the risk it poses for its own business. It even got so pushy about acquiring users address books that it destroyed its own Discover page in favor of a Friends page in hopes of capturing that data.

If the trend continues, it could impact other mainstream social networks, which have largely ignored this new avenue to gain users and havent adopted the live pics from friends widget format, either.

With the social graph filtering to smaller, simpler homescreen social networking apps, there also now comes the potential to build a different kind of social network that could be monetized in new ways beyond ads. These apps could roll out premium features, a subscription service, direct payment and more. But that future is still in question, as it remains to be seen whether homescreen social networking apps have long-term staying power among the historically fickle younger crowd who have adopted them.

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The next big social platform is the smartphones homescreen - TechCrunch