⏱Don’t sleep on Twitch

Vaccine troubles, and biased algorithms

Good morning everyone, and happy Saturday! We hope you have a great day planned.

0:05- A life fit for a prince

• Yesterday morning Prince Phillip, the 99 year-old Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II passed away at Windsor Castle. The royal family released a statement saying, “It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen announces the death of her beloved husband, His Royal highness The Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh” As a respected member of the global community, dignitaries from around the world flooded the internet with a series of tributes praising his life, charity work, and personality.

0:27- A decline almost as sharp as a needle

• Unfortunately, despite the overall vaccination efforts moving along swiftly, there are still speed bumps on the drive to immunity. Next week for example, Johnson & Johnson will only be delivering 700k doses, compared to the 4.9M distributed during this week. This more than 80% decline is largely thanks to a combination of the contamination issue that they struggled with early last week along with struggles caused by working with the federal government who has yet to federally approve more doses.

0:49- The world is getting Twitch-ier

• Last month the popular video game streaming platform Twitch, had its viewership record rise yet again to an incredible 2.1Bn hours watched during the month of March. This data, collected by Rainmaker.gg, marks a 105% YoY increase in traffic, buoyed in part by odd trends such as watching streamers sleep (two streamers in particular, Laudwigh, and Mizkif were responsible for 2M hours of that alone), and “subathon” events that have been raising money for charity. 

1:10- Algorithms are just as biased as humans

• A recent study conducted by the University of Southern California found that Facebook had implicit biases in its algorithms that caused it to present certain jobs to users depending on gender distribution in the field being advertised. A specific incident cited in the report found pizza delivery jobs were disproportionately shown to men while Instacart jobs were targeted towards women. While federal law explicitly prohibits hiring descrimination of this nature, the laws around advertising discrimination are murky at best.

Have a great rest of your day, and we’ll see you Monday bright and early!

-The 90 Second News Team

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