Mark Zuckerberg wants to merge his social media platforms; Microsoft employees start email turmoil; YouTube will discourage borderline content.
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Trending on Reddit, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to unify WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger into a single service. Four people involved in the process told the New York Times that the three services will remain separate, but the underlying infrastructure will be unified. The unification is expected to complete by the end of this year or early 2020. Zuckerberg has mandated the apps to have end-to-end encryption, which hides the content of a conversation from prying eyes. Still, many raise privacy concerns, especially when it comes to how user data will be shared among the apps. The plan is still in its early stages, but a year isn’t exactly a long time from now.
Over 11,000 Microsoft employees were overwhelmed with spam emails accidentally generated by their colleagues on Thursday. Trending on Reddit, When an admin messaged all Microsoft GitHub account holders on how to reduce notification count, many of its recipients decided to hit “Reply-All” instead of just the sender. Confused as to who to message, many other recipients also replied to all in hopes to unsubscribe from the chain. Eventually, the situation snowballed into a massive joke, with replies ranging from exasperation to jokes.
Trending on Google, YouTube will disparage videos that feature borderline content. These are videos that spread misinformation like the earth is flat, yet are still within the YouTube community guidelines. Using both machine learning and real people, YouTube hopes to reduce the likeliness of borderline content appearing in viewer’s recommendations. The change will only affect recommendations of a very small set of videos in the US, and will roll out to more countries as the system becomes more accurate.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Please also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. I’m your host Tom Li. Thanks for listening!
