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One quarter of Facebook users are deleting the app, Twitter and Facebook testify in front of U.S. congress and, a full list of over 2,000 Slack communities.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Thursday, September 6th, and I’m your host Meagan Simpson.
First from Google Trends: One quarter of Facebook users are purging the app from their phones. The survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center found that more and more young Americans are changing the way they use Facebook. One in four of adults surveyed have deleted the social media app from their phones and almost half have at least taken a break from the platform for several weeks or more. or at least adjusted their privacy settings over the past year. Here in Canada, a survey conducted in March after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, found that three quarters of Canadians would change the way they used Facebook and many more believed the social platform to have a negative impact on society. This news comes the same day as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg appeared at the U.S. Senate’s intelligence committee to discuss privacy concerns and foreign interference in elections.
Speaking of; next from LinkedIn: Sandberg faced the senate committee alongside Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and told the committee that both social media platforms are committed to privacy and fighting foreign interference on their platforms. Sandberg admitted Facebook’s fault in relation to the Russian election hacking. This comes after both companies have faced criticism over privacy concerns, allowing foreign interference in elections and biases on their platforms. Both Dorsey and Sandberg argued that Twitter and Facebook have taken great strides to improve security. However the lawmakers expressed concern that foreign actors like Russia and Iran will still be able to manipulate the social platforms heading into the 2018 midterm elections. Sandburg argued that Facebook has already made changes since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, has invested more heavily in artificial intelligence and hired more people to review fake accounts and content. Dorsey pledged a thorough review of the way Twitter works but said it has also already made moves such as removing hundreds of Russian and Iranian accounts as well as labelling bots on its site. Google execs were notably absent from the meeting, with a placard for the company placed in front of an empty chair and apparently referenced repeatedly by the senators.
Finally from Product Hunt: There’s now an easy way to join all the Slack communities you want. Standuply, a standup bot that can be integrated into Slack, curated a list of 2,000 Slack chat groups and communities and has made the list available for users. The list is categorized into different topics, such as product talks, IT talks, finance talks and more. Then it can be broken down even further, for example it has 278 IT talks that cover almost anything you can think of from big data to cloud and security for example. Standuply found that Slack has over 1 million members and in nine months the number of Slack communities increased by 2.5 times. The entire list can be found on the company’s website or on Product Hunt under ‘2000 (!) Slack Groups’.