Amazon shuts down Twitter campaign, Spotify removes Neil Young’s music, and an anti-work subreddit is private following a Fox News interview.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Friday, January 28th, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
Amazon has stopped an influence campaign in which it paid workers to tweet about how much they love working at the company. Amazon has been in the limelight numerous times in 2021 for the way it allegedly treated its employees. To combat this, according to The Verge, employees at Amazon warehouses were paid to share positive news about the company and to deny widely-reported workplace failings. Issues such as employees being extremely overworked and forced to skip bathroom breaks to meet performance targets were some of the claims the company was trying to stifle. A Financial Times article reported that senior Amazon executives were “unhappy with the scheme’s poor reach.” As a result, Amazon removed all traces of the campaign towards the end of last year.
On Wednesday, Spotify removed Neil Young’s music, as the singer isn’t wavering in his objections to Joe Rogan’s podcast. According to the Wall Street Journal, earlier this week, Young penned an open letter to his manager and label asking them to take down his music from the music streaming service, saying it’s spreading fake information about COVID-19 vaccines through Rogan’s podcast. The letter said, “they can have Rogan or Young. Not both.” Young went on to say that he hopes other singers will take a similar stance and boycott Spotify because of the platform’s “deadly misinformation about COVID.” This isn’t the first time Spotify has received a complaint regarding COVID-19 misinformation and Rogan’s podcast. Healthcare professionals and even Spotify employees have expressed concern over Rogan’s content.
An anti-work subreddit went private on Wednesday after a Fox News interview between anchor Jesse Watters and one of the subreddit’s moderators, Doreen Ford. Watters and Fox News hosts argued that the subreddit is helping fuel the Great Resignation, where millions of workers in the U.S. are leaving their jobs. Ford clarified that there are some misconceptions about the Great Resignation saying, “We want to put in labour, but we don’t want to necessarily be in a position where we feel trapped.” Following the interview, the subreddit went private and many of the posts and comments regarding anti-work were locked. On Thursday morning, when the subreddit was made public again, moderators said they were planning to remove Ford from her duties as a moderator.
And now for something a bit different. A German researcher has used one of Apple’s AirTags to uncover a secret German intelligence agency. Activist Lillith Whitman claims that she has discovered how Germany’s little-known Federal Telecommunications Service is actually a “camouflage authority” for a secret intelligence agency. According to an AppleInsider article, she sent a package with an AirTag and tracked it via Apple’s Find My system as it was delivered through the Berlin sorting center to a sorting office in Cologne-Ehrenfeld. The package then appeared at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne. The AirTag was originally addressed to a telecommunications authority based in one part of Germany, but ended up in the offices of an intelligence agency based in another part of the country.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, if you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Tom Li.