Google puts $375 million into health insurance startup Oscar, Alex Jones gets the boot from Twitter, and an app that tracks women’s fertility cycles gains the approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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Trending on Linkedin, Google’s parent company Alphabet is putting $375 million into a health insurance startup. Oscar CEO Mario Schlosser says the funds will help the company expand beyond the individual healthcare exchanges and small employer markets and into the Medicare Advantage market that cares for people 65 and older. Oscar’s tech-backed health insurance plans have gained the interest of several other backers, and to date, the health insurer has raised more than $1 billion.
There’s a lot of chatter on Reddit about Twitter’s decision to block conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ account temporarily. Twitter says Jones’ account had been restricted because of a tweet linking to a video that was in violation of the platform’s rules. The ban prevents Jones from tweeting, retweeting, liking or commenting on other tweets. The latest move from Twitter comes weeks after multiple other platforms including Spotify and YouTube kicked Jones off permanently. Twitter has faced a lot of criticism over its inconsistent enforcement of its own terms of agreement. Last week, before Jones’ suspension, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that, at that time, Jones hadn’t broken any rules, and put the onus on journalists to police the truth on the platform.
And lastly, on LinkedIn, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says an app that tracks women’s fertility can be considered a contraceptive. The app, called Natural Cycles, uses a woman’s body temperature to tell her when she isn’t fertile and is used by 900,000 people and has already been certified in the European Union. Natural Cycles is the first app ever to be approved for contraception in the U.S.
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