Social Media News Is Where It's At in the USA - DTNSB 5042
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This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 17th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on the context of those stories, and help each other understand. And today, Dr. Nicky tells us about why certain scientific studies are given the green light, even though they might seem silly. And social media, as news sources, has passed a major milestone. Yeah, it has. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Merritt. Let's start with what you need to know with The Big Story. ♪

Also known as the big stories, because there's a couple of them that we'll talk about. First, for the first time, social media and video platforms have surpassed television as America's primary source for news. This is according to a report by Neiman Lab. The report shows that 54% of Americans actually

access news through these online channels. That's compared to 50% for TV, 48% for news websites, news apps, that sort of thing. The shift is more pronounced with younger audiences, as we could probably imagine, at least to a certain degree anyways, who show a strong preference for video content on devices, smartphones, that sort of thing. Also social media platforms,

Also, a preference for creators instead of traditional publishers. And there's a lot of information in here. I just pulled out a few things that kind of caught my eye in scanning through it. Digital news subscriptions have plateaued. Only one in five Americans paying for online news online.

Podcasts, which we care a lot about around here, gaining ground in the US with an almost equal and actually a little bit more than, but right there on the same level, percentage of people consuming news podcasts as do read a printed newspaper or listen to news on the radio.

And then 33% of the global sample – so this isn't just U.S., but the global sample – use TikTok for news. Less so in the U.S., but still, nonetheless, a lot of people go into TikTok for news, which, I mean, as we've seen in the last couple of years –

When I think of that, I think like, well, that's ridiculous. Why would you get your news from a social media video sharing platform? But it's not like we're getting news reports necessarily through TikTok. I think largely what is happening is people are sharing when news is happening on TikTok. So it's a really great place to go for breaking news, glimpses, insight into the situations as they're happening or close to.

And news sources have TikTok accounts. So there is some of that, like, oh, the New York Times has a TikTok account. CBS News has a TikTok account. So it's in the mix as well. But you're right. They're not sitting down and turning on TikTok at 5.30 p.m. to watch the evening TikTok. I think that's one of the things that may have slipped by people, if you weren't paying close attention, is that we're not saying 54% of Americans access news online, but

It's through these kinds of channels. 48% are using news websites or apps, 54% using social media. And that is concerning to me a little bit because of that mix. And I think it really is a big explanation of some of the confusion and stress people feel about the news because it's

It takes more cognitive load to sort out what's reliable and what's not when you're using YouTube, TikTok, X, Mastodon, et cetera, because everything is presented on an equal playing ground.

Back when we were kids, you knew that the zine printed up on Xerox copy paper needed a little more skepticism. It still might be extremely valuable, but it needed a little extra skepticism than the printed tabloid daily newspaper, which needed a different kind of skepticism. I'm not saying everything was true in there, but you knew you could rely on large parts of it. And on these platforms, everything's equal.

And production values are so high that even on the video, everything's equal. And some people, I think, even go, well, the mainstream media, lamestream media, I can't trust them. But this person out on the street is going to give me the truth. And while that is sometimes the case, they also might have a secret agenda or they just might not be very good at what they're doing and telling you something that's not accurate.

Yeah, probably to a certain degree, what this really reflects is what we hear about a lot right now around, you know, you talked a little bit about the distrust or the mistrust in mainstream media, right? And so if people aren't trusting the mainstream approach, the way you and I, you know, were exposed to it when we were younger, where are they going to go? If they're going to these online places, they are finding more, you know, I mean, and, you know, to be entirely fair, like we

We're doing a news podcast right now. We aren't working for a news organization, but we are doing what we can to present news in a fair fashion. It's still incumbent upon the person on the other end to scrutinize and to make sure that this is a trustworthy source of information. And I think a lot of what we've seen recently and we hear a lot about is

Mm-hmm.

I don't know how many times I have talked to a friend who said, I found this thing online. And, and honestly, usually it's not consequential stuff that, that, you know, could endanger the world. It's, it's usually some kind of entertainment news, but I'm like, well, who said it? And they just get frustrated. Multiple people. I'm not just talking about one person. Like, well, I don't know. And I'm like, well, then how do you know whether to trust it or not? It's, it's,

And I know I'm being annoying, but it is annoying to have to think that way. And it's too hard for somebody, anyone, including myself. And I find myself doing this, too, where you see something, you're like, man, I really want to believe that. And you resist what you know you should do, which is question the source because you want to believe it so much.

Yeah, totally. Confirming what we're looking for, you know? Yeah, totally. It's like, oh, I want that to be true. Or maybe I don't want it to be true, but it's so titillating, right? Or so interesting that I don't want to spend the time to undermine it because maybe, like you say, it confirms your worldview. Or maybe it's just a fact that when we operate in these kinds of places for our news sources—

There is so much information flying towards us all the time that it becomes overwhelming or, you know, almost defeat. You're almost defeated if you want to try and vet any of this stuff. It's too hard. It's massive. For most people to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think that really one of the things that you have to remember is that I'm not trying to say,

Right.

It's just that you have to figure those out. You have to go and you have to look into them a little more, which in the old days when you had one daily newspaper, three broadcast media news sources, and a couple of radio sources, you didn't have to work as hard to decide whether it was reliable or not. And it was the rare story from those venues that you had to raise your eyebrow and go, wait, is that really the case? Yeah.

The cool thing is now we have more ways than ever to investigate and find out if they're true, but we also have more things than ever that we have to try to investigate to find out if they're true. And verify and everything. My, you know, my friend, our, our mutual friend, Jeff Jarvis, you know, he's steep, his career is steeped in, in mass media. And he's, he's talked very recently on, on the AI inside podcast that I do with him about the death of mass media. And he,

He's much more educated around explaining this, but essentially what he means is that right now we're getting back to a moment that existed a couple of hundred years ago where the voices were very independent. And you did have to kind of cognitively, you did have to kind of understand or know kind of where you're getting that information from versus being served it on a silver platter, you know, in the form of mass media. I was doing a research for a historical study once and,

I came across the fact that there were like dozens and dozens of daily newspapers in Boston in the 1800s. Like you just picked one that was the flavor that you went with and they had nothing that looked like journalistic ethics. That's what I think Jeff is talking about is like, yeah, this used to just be the way it was. We're back to that. And it took a while for that to boil down.

Yeah, interesting. Well, real quick before we move on, another study, a separate study by Nielsen showed another first streaming officially becoming the dominant way Americans watch television, 44.8%.

beating the combined viewership of cable and broadcast networks at 44.2% for the first time ever. Again, the shift largely driven by younger viewers, but also a surge in users over 65 who've shifted toward the free ad-supported platforms like Tubi and YouTube is another one. YouTube led all streaming services with a record share of 12.5%, followed next by Netflix at 7.5%.

Yeah. YouTube is actually bigger than broadcast cable and streaming TV. Like, yes, that is wild. And this is why we're seeing Warner Brothers Discovery and Comcast say, you know what? We're going to take our cable and TV networks and spin them out. They're not spinning out their streaming services. They're spinning out the literal cable and TV part of it.

Yeah. Interesting stuff. There we go. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. That's who we're beholden to. That's why we're an independent voice. Thank you, AB Puppy, Dale Mulcahy, Matt Zaglin, and Super Geek. Super Geek! We appreciate your support. Super Geek! Super Geek!

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There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. OpenAI reportedly having some tough negotiations with Microsoft as it needs that company to approve OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit company. Microsoft loves that idea. It just wants a big chunk of it.

According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is considering accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive practices and seeking regulatory intervention as an option. Doesn't mean they're going to do it, but they're considering pulling out that weapon. These two companies have a six-year relationship that's being disrupted by a number of factors, including OpenAI's $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf, which is a coding startup that directly competes with Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.

Open AI's agreement with Microsoft includes IP sharing, intellectual property sharing, but Open AI would rather not share Windsor's IP with a direct competitor, which I understand. And of course, Microsoft wants a larger stake in a restructured for-profit Open AI than Open AI would like them to have, as well as exclusivity over cloud resources. So hardball negotiations between these two friends.

Yeah, and who knows whether it's actually going to go to that extent of the anti-competitive –

charges or whatever, the regulatory intervention, but it's certainly a big piece of the chess game between two big companies. Don't make me pull this out. Yeah, totally. Reportedly having this article leaking out gets people talking about it more, kind of applies some pressure on both sides to influence the situation. OpenAI links this to Wall Street Journal specifically so that Microsoft reads about this and goes, whoa, hold on. What are you all doing there?

There you go. It's a grand dance, if you will. OpenAI has secured its first contract. This is a different type of dance. First contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, sorry, worth up to $200 million as part of its new OpenAI for Government initiative. This contract will last for one year and aims to develop advanced AI prototypes for national security needs,

in military administrative applications, as well as providing chat GPT enterprise and gov access for federal state and local governments and employees. The company will also provide custom models that are tailored around national security as they're needed. The contract opens up

a new revenue stream basically for the company, which has up until now been primarily driven by consumer use by its consumer base. I know a lot of people are going to be concerned about this, uh, especially because they don't like to see military funding from companies, uh,

That's going to happen. The United States military is going to want to have access to the best technology that they can buy, especially if that's made by a U.S. company. So you're not going to not see this happen.

It is also important for the military to have the security that these kinds of tools can provide. I mean, yes, some of this probably is LLMs and chatbots, but some of it is monitoring security networks and sort of matching wits with people who are using AI on the other side to try to break in networks. And this is the kind of thing that can really improve security. This is one of the things that people have shown, right? So you want –

If you don't want the U.S. military to fall, if you do, then that's a whole different conversation, I suppose. But if you want the U.S. military to be able to do its job, it needs to have access to these tools. Indeed. Yep.

The Oregonian saw a memo shared with Intel employees that says the company is going to lay off 15 to 20 percent of factory workforce starting next month, July 2025. That follows 15,000 jobs it cut in 2024. Intel will not offer voluntary buyouts, though, this time, instead basing its costs on investment priorities and individual performance.

Oh, Intel. Are you okay? Is everything all right, Intel? I don't think they're okay. Maybe they'll be okay. I think they're probably okay. They still got a long road. Yes. I don't think they're going anywhere, but no one likes to see that. Mongolians, I want to say Eugene, but it's Egun, I think, or Egun? I'm not sure, but Mongolians- E-G-U-N-E. E-G-U-N-E, so interpret it as you will. AI has developed a foundation model, one of the few companies to do so that isn't from the U.S., China, or Europe.

I'm going to continue saying Eugene. It just gives it a personality. Eugene's LLM. It's not Eugene. Began training on Mongolian data sets in November 2022, weeks before the launch of ChatGPT. Last year, it launched a 30 billion parameter model trained over eight weeks on 96 GPUs. And if it

I don't actually know this, but I bet it does work in English, but

Probably not as well because that's not what they're trying to do. They are training them specifically to work as what is called a sovereign AI. In other words, one that is meant to work in Mongolia for Mongolians, developed by Mongolians. No one else can control it but people in Mongolia. And this is a great story because –

This is the kind of thing that people have been saying many countries need to do. A lot of people have been talking in Europe about this. Not that Europe doesn't have some really good companies like Mistral. But yeah, I think if this was in English, people would be going wild for this. Probably because you could invest in it and more people are going to use it because English is so much more widely spoken. But this is a heck of an achievement. And they are getting investment and getting rounds of funding now.

that reflect how good they are i mean 96 gpus eight weeks for 30 billion parameter model that's that's impressive yeah um i i picture if this uh llm was a picture of a person it would be someone wearing nerdy glasses with uh some tape in between because its name is eugene it's egun i know but it looks like egun yeah egun all right eugene

The heels of the bankruptcy court's decision to award the assets of 23andMe to a nonprofit operated by its co-founder, Ann Wojcicki, which we talked about yesterday. The UK has fined 23andMe 2.31 million pounds. That's about $3 million US. The

This is in regards to the 2023 attack that exposed users' genetic data. 23andMe found to be culpable in not taking enough preventative measures by UK regulators. I don't know who pays this.

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. It may not be TTAM, which is the nonprofit that's taking over 23andMe. It may be the bankrupt entity that's left behind because I know they're not taking on a lot of the debt of 23andMe because of the bankruptcy process. So I'd be curious how that works out. The timing is very curious. Yeah. It's very interesting that we get one major piece of news and then this follows on it. So it's like, what's going on here? They're not related, but yeah, it's just interesting how the news works. Yeah, yeah.

Honda has entered the cargo delivery micro mobility market with the new Fastport E-Quad. It's a compact battery-assisted four-wheeled vehicle designed for urban delivery needs. So the vehicle has this large enclosed cargo hold in the back.

Still small enough to easily navigate through congested city traffic using bike lanes, for example. The smaller Mini Cooper version has a payload capacity between 320 to 650 pounds and reaches a top speed of 12 miles per hour. So pretty slow, but that allows it to comply with bike lane restrictions.

They're powered by swappable 22-pound mobile power pack batteries. So you can just pop a new one in when you need to. The new vehicles will be built at the Honda Performance Manufacturing Center in Ohio. It looks like you're driving a refrigerator.

Totally. Yeah. It does not look very maneuverable. Yeah. It probably is, but it looks – yeah, it's very boxy. I mean, by design. I imagine this in dense city centers that need baked goods and fresh meats delivered to restaurants. I don't know why that's the first thing that popped into my mind, but it's that kind of thing. It's somebody delivering small bits of stuff in places where you don't have a lot of room to drive a big old truck. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Indeed. Patreon announced it's increasing its platform fees for new creators. Not us. New creators. If you start a new Patreon. I've started enough. I'm not going to start anymore. Starting August 5th. So actually, if you want to start one, you want to do it before August 5th.

It's actually consolidating the pro and premium plans into a single standard plan that will take 10% of creators' earnings. That is up from 8%. Premium users actually save by shifting from 12% to an 11% rate with the option of dropping to 8% if they don't want the merchandise feature.

So there's some ways to save money, too, as well. Existing users, however, don't see an increase. Those who sign up before the new platform fee deadline is reached won't see an increase. Patreon says the price hike reflects a number of expanded services that have been added since 2019, like media hosting, multiple RSS feeds, community features, chat, stuff like that.

Maybe related to the, quote, Apple tax to a certain degree, possibly? No, because they avoided that. Because of the court order, Patreon does not have to – it can direct people outside of Patreon. So they're not even going to get rid of per-episode billing, per-post billing for now. So it's definitely not because of that. In fact, maybe because they don't have to do that, they're doing this. I don't know. Yeah.

Interesting. Interesting. Netflix announced it will open the first of two locations of its permanent Netflix house in Philadelphia and Dallas later this year. It also said it plans to open one at Boulevard in Las Vegas in 2027. Netflix houses are

immersive experiences from popular Netflix franchises, Stranger Things, One Piece, which is one that I haven't heard of, but Wednesday, Squid Game, pretty much the biggies. They'll also have a restaurant similar to the pop-up that opened in Las Vegas. I'm pausing for that group of people that are still yelling, Jason hasn't heard of One Piece. Go watch it now. Okay.

Really? Okay. It's incredibly popular. I'm surprised I missed it then. But yeah, these houses are really interesting. I always thought Netflix would move into the amusement park game at some point. I think this is it.

But it's less costly, kind of a baby step towards it without having to put a bunch of outlay on land and roller coasters and stuff. But it's that kind of thing. Like you go there. Yeah, they're going to have the restaurants. But you go there to do the fun, immersive experiences. That's very interesting. Interesting. Yep.

Spectrum Internet subscribers in Southern California, including me, experienced significant outages over the weekend. And this is why we're talking about it, because we don't usually talk about outages. Vandals...

for copper. If you don't know, people are always digging around. An apartment building nearby had copper pipes stolen from it and they had to get their water shut off. People are crazy for finding copper and selling it. Well, these vandals were not very smart because they dug up some

fiber optic cables and then realized, oh wait, there's no copper in a fiber optic cable. Thousands of customers lost internet service during the outage with normal operation restored about 12 hours later. I'll tell you, it exactly went out at about 2 a.m. because that's when we tried to turn off the lights and it didn't work over the Amazon Echo. And it came back at 8.15 p.m. later that day.

Uh, spectrum, however, this is the newsy part is offering a $25,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest of those responsible. Affected customers will also receive a one day service credit on their next bill. Thank you for that spectrum. Uh,

And yeah, if you're the people who were trying to steal the copper, turn yourselves in and claim the $25,000 reward, right? Does it work like that? Yeah. That's genius. Yeah, totally. It totally works like that, Jason. Yeah, do it. Do it, please. No, totally do that.

Instagram is testing a new repost feature that will allow users to share both their own as well as other users' posts directly in their main feed. The button is appearing for some, but it appears to function similarly to the retweet feature that you might find on platforms like X, Twitter, whatever. Instagram has not confirmed when or if this repost feature will actually roll out to everyone. So yet another feature coming to Instagram. There you go.

Nice. And Meta's Threads app testing a new feature that hides spoilers. In more news of Meta products getting old features, you can now hide spoilers in text and image, blurring the content until someone chooses to reveal it. The tool is meant to encourage more open discussions about TV shows and movies on the platform without risk of spoiling key points. And I have to say, it's like a menu system, so it's a little easier to use than some other spoiler systems. It's not bad. I appreciate when those things exist. Yeah, me too.

Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper, Jason. All right, let's do it. We've heard about this or that scientific study coming along, and you kind of wonder, why would they do that study? That's a weird one. Well, Dr. Nicky has the answer. Hi, Nicky. Thank you for bringing us Ridiculous Science.

Oh, you know, that is one of my favorite things to bring to DTNS. So I'm glad we get to talk about it today. And specifically, I have a colleague who's coming out with a new book called The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog by Carly Ann York. And those maybe sound like things we would have covered on DTNS. So that's why I'm bringing you this book.

It's coming out in June. And I was actually lucky enough to talk to Carly at a conference in January. This was the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. And we chatted about her book, and I'm really excited about its release. So I wanted to tell you about it too. Yeah. Salmon Cannons, Levitating Frogs. I'm in. What's the book about? Yeah. So it's not just about salmons and frogs, but it's really about the type of research that I like to come and talk to on DTNS. Yeah.

In science, we call this basic science. It's kind of the things that you do where you may not know exactly what is the point of this study. People like to ask, why are you wasting taxpayer money on silly research like caring about spider silk glowing in the dark or understanding why squids...

swim a certain way. What's the point of this? It seems like a waste. What are we doing? Yeah, I've run into this a lot, even with people who are enthusiastic about technology, where they hear about a study and it's not immediately obvious what it's good for. And the question is, okay, but why? Why value this kind of seemingly useless thing?

Yeah, and that's a fair question. People want to know how things apply to their life. But the goal of basic science is not the immediate pursuit of applications. It rather is just to understand phenomena in the natural world. And maybe potentially this will have applications later, but it's not what we're going for right now.

maybe future research can build on this knowledge. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so give me some examples that maybe, I don't know if they're pulled from the book or just examples. Yeah, this one's pulled from the book and I really like it. So,

Have you ever heard of sea fireflies? I hadn't until I read this example. I want to say I have now, but I don't think I actually have. You have now. I think I've just seen like sci-fi movies with glowing things in the water. So they're little tiny crustaceans and they glow. And around the 1950s, scientists knew about them for about 20 years, but they kind of didn't care about them. They're like, we don't know how they glow, but it doesn't really seem important. So yeah.

Whatever. They're not going to study it. But in 1965, a Japanese chemist isolated the enzyme responsible for the way that they glow. And then a U.S. researcher contacted him and was really interested in this. And together they worked on unraveling how glowing jellyfish emitted light. Oh, okay. So this may start to sound familiar. And that's because together they discovered green fluorescent protein, also known as GFP. Have you heard of GFP?

I had GFP doesn't ring a bell, but I feel like I should know green fluorescent protein.

You should, but maybe it gets glazed over. It's pretty important in biomedical research to the point that the team earned the 208, 2008 rather, Nobel Prize in chemistry for GFP. And it's basically the main fluorescent thing that we use for everything in biomedical sciences. If you ever see like, oh, they made a cat glow in the dark or they made, there's a new type of flower now that you can buy that has GFP in it. It's one of the gene edited proteins that's really interesting.

quote-unquote easy to gene edit. We also use it to track the spread of cancer cells. We use it during surgery to visualize nerves. So it's all over the place in biomedicine. And it's because

And someone decided they wanted to figure out why these little crabs were glowing. Yeah. Why does it glow? And then what can we do with it comes next. The book is coming out at a time when there's a lot of debate in the U.S. government about whether they should be funding science. But, you know, what is the value of the government funding science? Yeah.

Yeah, and we talk about this every month on DTNS, so I'm sure you guys are familiar with that by now. And this book covers something really interesting and also kind of personal to me, and we'll talk about how this affects my research too. But one example is there's a fluid dynamics researcher, David, who was featured in a quote-unquote waste book in 2016. I don't know if you've heard about waste books. Yeah, I have heard about that. Okay, so it's kind of like a political –

I don't know, not joke, but like a political highlight. Like a name and shame kind of thing. Exactly. So Senator Jeff Flake, who's a Republican from Arizona, compiled at the time basically a book of what he considered the most wasteful uses of government funding. And it included three grants from David Hu, who on the surface looks like wasteful work. So Dr. Hu studies how long it takes mammals to pee.

So sure. Okay. That seems wasteful. Isolated. That sounds silly. Yeah. Right. But like, obviously science is in a context of other things. And now that research is being used by doctors to evaluate whether or not people have prostate cancer. So I don't think actually it was that wasteful, especially if you're someone who worries about prostate cancer.

Yeah, absolutely. It's something of my age that I get tested for regularly. It's super important. And as we know, the former president has now prostate cancer. So I don't know if it was thanks to this mammals peeing study, but maybe it was. The point being that the book highlights a lot of these kinds of examples of things that maybe on the surface appear silly, but may have helped society. And

It really shows that it's impossible to predict where a scientific project is going to end up, how it's going to benefit society. And basically that science for the sake of science is still pretty worthwhile. Yeah.

Yeah, I imagine there are scientists who do just want to waste people's money, but I think they're pretty rare. I don't know.

And it sounds silly because when you take it out of context, it sounds like the end was deciding how long mammals pee and who cares about that. But that wasn't the end. The end was let's figure this out so that we can then figure the next thing out because you have to start with something.

Yeah. Like learning about the fluid dynamics of pee seems weird, but someone has to figure it out. Like, you know, it, to me, it's obvious that that would have medical applications some, somewhere down the line, but maybe not to everyone. I mean, my research is on head-butting goats and I think maybe a lot of people think that sounds silly initially. And I didn't start out trying to figure out, you know, how can we solve human concussion, but I'm assuming that's

probably where I'll end up, but I am on some of these kinds of lists as well, so...

It's maybe a little personal. You know, when people talk about holistic medicine, a lot of times they very much value the story of like someone noticing something in nature and like realizing that, you know, the ladybugs do this. And so we realize that this plant is good for this kind of thing. It's the same thing. That's a very good point. We love bio-inspiration, but we're not patient enough to wait until it has like a good effect.

ending story sometimes. Yeah, yeah. Well, Dr. Nikki, thank you for bringing us this good story, the book. First of all, remind people the name of the book so they can go check it out for themselves and then let folks know where they can find more of what you do. Yes, I will remind you. The book is called The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog by Carly Ann York. I assume you can go find it where you find books. It's coming out in June, probably on bookshop.com.

And then if you want to find me, I'm over at NicoleAckermans.com and the same handle on Blue Sky. Fantastic. Thanks, Nikki. Have a good one. If you'd like to hear more from Carly Ann York.

themselves. Dr. Nikki's going to interview her. In fact, we've been soliciting questions in our Discord, so keep an eye out for that interview on the weekend edition of DTNS. Also, what do you want to hear us talk about on this show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at reddit.com slash r slash Daily Tech News Show.

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Andrew says, interested to see how WhatsApp promise of ads in language of the user works. I'm skeptical as all big streamers can't figure out. I'm an English speaking person watching English language content in an English language version of their app. And they feed me mostly French ads because I'm in Quebec based on my IP address. I assume. Cheers. Andrew, Andrew question. Okay. Okay.

And he's like, yes, I have opted to pay for no ads on some of the services. But I could tell you exactly why they do this because I get Spanish language ads because I'm in Los Angeles quite often. Those are different than what WhatsApp is doing. WhatsApp could avoid this because you're right. They are targeting you based on your IP address only. WhatsApp can say no.

Oh, it's an English language user. Only give them English language ads. Andrew is right to question whether they will do that or not. We'll find out.

We will find out. Thank you for sending that in. If anyone out there wants to send in your thoughts, please do. If you got some insight into a story, thinking about something we talked about, share it. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Thanks again to Andrew. Thanks to Dr. Nikki for contributing to today's show. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. And great news here. If you want to keep up on music news, Daily Music Headlines is now available as an Amazon Flash briefing. Check it out. We'll see you next time.

The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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