Bloomberg goes one-on-one with Bill Gates, DuckDuckGo is picking up steam, and a civil rights group calls out Facebook.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Tuesday, Sept. 18, and I’m your host Alex Coop.
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Bill Gates took part in a one-on-one with Bloomberg this week, and hit a number of topics during the discussion. He talked about his passion towards fighting climate change and funding a cure for COVID, the nightmare that is misinformation, and other technology leaders, like Elon Musk. Bill Gates says climate change is an even harder problem than the pandemic, and that the damage done every year moving forward will be greater than what we’ve seen during this pandemic. Gates also addressed comparisons between Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, to which he said “You wouldn’t walk into a room and confuse them with each other.” He says Musk was a more hands-on engineer, while Jobs he says was a master designer and planner. [Twitter thread]
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While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet. The privacy-minded search engine says it saw over 2 billion searches and 4 million app/extension installations in recent months. The company also said that they have over 65 million active users. DuckDuckGo might end up crushing its old traffic record if the same growth trend continues.
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And lastly, a U.S. civil rights group says that over a five-year period, Facebook executives received numerous warnings that event pages were being used to organize hate rallies and other far-right gatherings that encouraged violent threats against others. Muslim Advocates, a national civil rights group that works to halt bigotry on the internet, told Gizmodo that it warned senior Facebook officials about events advocating violence being organized on its platform no fewer than 10 times since 2015.
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