#FacebookIsOverParty
By: Jessica Bedussi 

Last week, six organizations banded together urging brands to pause Facebook advertising in July. The ADL, the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color Of Change, Free Press, and Common Sense all cited a history of the platform “amplifying the messages of white supremacists, permitting incitement to violence, and failing to disrupt bad actors using the platform to do harm.”

The campaign, called #StopHateForProfit, urges brands to stop all Facebook and Instagram spend to pressure the platform into adopting stricter policies on racist and hateful speech.

The boycott includes a list of recommended product changes for Facebook. These focus on three categories:

1. Supporting people who are targets of identity hate

2. Stopping ad revenue generation from misinformation and harmful content

3. Increasing safety in private Facebook Groups

So far, a number of brands including The North Face, Patagonia, REI, Ben & Jerry's, Eddie Bauer, and Upwork, have co-signed, agreeing to pause all Facebook and Instagram spend for the month of July.  

Facebook has historically ignored these types of requests. However, with a number of brands collectively withholding millions of dollars, the platform may be forced to make a change.  

Google Passwords 2.0
By: Jiho Chung

Based on a Google survey in February 2019, 52% of us tend to use the same password for multiple accounts and 13% reuse that same password across all accounts. And considering how data leaks and hacking are becoming more frequent, Google has been working on a solution to further inhibit this from happening with Password Checkup.

Teaming with Stanford University, this new feature helps users to create effective passwords by checking them against ones that have already been leaked. Featured on Google Accounts and also as Chrome extension, Password Checkup doesn’t store or see a user’s password but detects a compromised match in its database. Although this isn’t a relatively new idea with companies like Watchtower leveraging the popular database “Have I Been Pwned” of more than nine billion compromised accounts, Google has the advantage due to its much greater scale.

With over 1.5 billion Gmail accounts and Chrome as the most-used browser across the internet, this comes at an opportune time with most still working from home.

The number of babies born in the United States in the coming months and years is expected to fall sharply because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to two new studies. The U.S. could see as many as 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births as early as next year in what researchers are calling a "COVID baby bust."