Hashtag Trending – Facebook’s optional political ads; CIA cyber weapons stolen; Twitter’s new feature

Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook will allow users to turn off political ads, the CIA’s largest data breach is due to not enough security, Twitter rolls out a new feature.

It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Thursday, June 18, and I’m your host Baneet Braich.

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Facebook will allow users to turn off political ads. Mark Zuckerburg recently announced that “everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content.” Facebook users will be able to turn off ads about political, social, and electoral issues from political candidates and organizations. Zuckerburg says the social media giant wants to help 4 million people register to vote, and boost marginalized voices leading up to the 2020 presidential election. The platform will have a Voting Information Center with information about registration, early voting, and voting by mail.

An internal report released Tuesday says the largest theft of the CIA where nearly 34 terabytes of data were stolen occurred because an employee took advantage and gave secret hacking tools to WikiLeaks. It was back in 2017 when Wikileaks shared documents about some of the CIA’s top cyber weapons. The recent report says the cyberweapons were being built at the expense of securing the CIA’s own systems. The report’s authors wrote how they failed to recognize the warning signs that a CIA employee posed an unacceptable risk to national security.

Sometimes Twitter’s character limit may interfere with what you need to tweet. Now there is a solution. Twitter is rolling out a new feature that will let you record your voice and tweet it. Only available on iOS for a limited group, each voice tweet captures up to 140 seconds of audio. But if you have more to say, Twitter says a new voice tweet starts automatically to create a thread. The new function has piqued many people’s interest, while also raising an obvious concern about how it will add to the platform’s abuse problem. Flagging text-only Tweets is one thing, audio is something else. Twitter says iOS users should have access “in the coming weeks.”

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 Baneet Braich, thanks for listening.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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