TikTok’s CEO steps down after 100 days in office, Apple is making it harder for Facebook to advertise, and in a shocking turn of events, it turns out Scots version of Wikipedia was written by someone who was clueless about the language.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Friday, August 28, and I’m your host Alex Coop.
TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer is stepping down after 100 days on the job, recently saying that the political environment that has “sharply changed” impacted his decision. Mayer’s departure comes just months after he joined the Chinese-owned video app. TikTok has recently found itself in an awkward situation with President Trump, who has ordered owner ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations by mid-September or face being blocked. ByteDance is currently in talks with Microsoft (LinkedIn’s parent company), Oracle and other bidders over a potential deal to sell its U.S., Canadian, Australian and New Zealand operations.
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Facebook is upset that Apple is making it harder for them to track you and blast people with advertisements. Facebook published a blog post this week decrying changes Apple has planned for its iOS 14 mobile operating system. Apple is looking to prevent apps from tracking users with their unique device identifier, or IDFA, without their explicit permission – something that Facebook’s Audience Network uses to personalize advertising in third-party apps.
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And lastly, it turns out that a US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia. The wiki, comprising of more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a young lad who was clearly clueless about the language. In the middle ages, Scots was one of the great literary languages of the British Isles, but around the 18th-century, intellectuals like David Hume removed “Scotticisms” from their writing and speech. According to the Guardian, it has enjoyed growing momentum in recent years, and one of the forums designed to promote it is Scots Wikipedia, the largest open-access repository of the Scots language in the world. After someone pointed out the thousands of errors on the pages, the 19-year-old North Carolinian, who was also an administrator for the wiki, responded on Wikipedia saying that he was “devastated” at the reaction “after years of my thinking I was doing good”.
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