Welcome to Hashtag Trending. In today’s news, Stephen King has finally had enough of Facebook, TCL to stop making BlackBerry phones, and Yahoo to open its 2006 time capsule.
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Thank you for tuning in, it’s Tuesday, February 4th, and I’m your host, Tom Li
Trending on Reddit, esteemed author Stephen King has announced that he has quit Facebook. The 72-year-old author, renowned for his horror fiction, said he was dissuaded by Facebook’s false information on political advertising and lack of privacy. Instead, King will be active on Twitter, where political ads have been banned since late last year. Although Facebook has previously entertained reducing political ad frequency, it has yet to take any major actions against them. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously stated that Facebook would not fact-check political ads. Then again, doing so would be too resource-intensive, which was the reason why Google and Twitter chose the alternative and banned the ads altogether.
I'm quitting Facebook. Not comfortable with the flood of false information that's allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users' privacy. Follow me (and Molly, aka The Thing of Evil) on Twitter, if you like.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) February 1, 2020
If you’re an die-hard BlackBerry smartphone user, then you may find our next news a bit disheartening. Trending on Twitter, With TCL’s licensing agreement with BlackBerry expiring on August 31, 2020, there may never be another BlackBerry phone. The BlackBerry, once loved for its physical keyboard, security and BlackBerry messenger, hasn’t been a top-selling phone for almost five years. Some analysts claim that only 850,000 BlackBerry phones were sold in 2018. BlackBerry’s latest phone was the KEY2 LE launched in August 2018. TCL promises to provide software updates until 2022.
— BlackBerry Mobile (@BBMobile) February 3, 2020
Trending on Reddit, Yahoo will open up its time capsule planted all the way back in 2006. Given the tectonic shifts in humanity’s development, it would be gratifying to look back to 2006 and appreciate the progresses and regresses we’ve made. Enclosed within isn’t a collection of past relics, however, but rather 171 thousand messages that encapsulate the world’s sentiments at the time.
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 Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. I’m Tom Li, thanks for listening.