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First up trending on Twitter, and basically everywhere else, yesterday hundreds of staff from Google’s office around the world staged a series of walkouts in protest over how sexual misconduct allegations are dealt with at the firm. The staff want Google to end forced arbitration and disclose harassment reports. They’re also asking for a better salary and additional transparency, with consistent misconduct reporting. The #MeToo style demonstration is in response to a New York Times report that revealed Google had suppressed allegations of sexual misconduct against several of its executives, including Andy Rubin, the creator of the company’s Android software.
Trending on Reddit, Tim-Berners Lee has a few things to say about Silicon Valley’s tech giants. The inventor of the World Wide Web says that giants like Facebook and Google have become so dominant that maybe it’s time to break them up. He says he’s disappointed with the state of the internet after several scandals involving the abuse of personal data and the spread of hate through social media. He says: “Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, by the interest going somewhere else.”
Finally trending on LinkedIn, remember about a week ago when Morgan Stanley said Facebook could lose up to three million European Union users? Well in its Q3 earnings, Facebook says it continued to lose users in Europe for the second consecutive quarter. The trend comes from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It saw two million monthly active users drop since the first quarter in addition to four million daily users. The stats are significant since most of Facebook’s users are from Europe. There was no growth in U.S. or Canada.