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Tech News Today for April 6, 2017

Tech News for Thursday April 6, 2017

Twitter and politics have been buddies these past few years, for better or worse, and now those worlds are colliding even further. Twitter filed a lawsuit against the United States government in response to demands by the Department of Homeland Security to reveal the true identity behind the @ALT_USCIS Twitter account. Twitter warns that unmasking the account would have a chilling effect on free speech and that the request is unlawful. Read more at mashable.com.

Facebook's new artificial intelligence tool to combat fake news isn't AI at all. Instead, its an educational campaign designed to help you spot fake news. To start, the new tool will show up at the top of the news feed for Facbook users in 14 countries. They might even pay fact checkers to get things right. In an interview in the Financial Times regarding fake news, Facebook Vice President Adam Mosseri says, “We’re against it and want to take it seriously. It’s a large problem, predates Facebook, predates the internet." This is a far cry from CEO Mark Zuckerberg's assertion just five months ago that to think that fake news on Facebook had any influence was a "pretty crazy idea." Read more at newsroom.fb.com.

YouTube is cracking down on which creators can actually make money by hosting their content on the platform. Going forward, monetization for a channel won’t be possible until that channel has more than 10 thousand lifetime views. Prior to this, anyone could start a channel and monetize it from the get go. YouTube says the threshold provides enough insight into the channel to verify that its following YouTube’s community guidelines. Read more at theverge.com.

The Clips app from Apple is out and we did a hands-on review with it in the office. It's like Snapchat, but instead of being a social network, it's a super easy tool to create stuff to post on other social networks. It's free and only available on iOS, for now. It works great for those of us who have a thousand photos of our dogs and feel that we need to spice them up a bit. Read more at imore.com.

Microsoft unleashed the specs of its next big console, Scorpio, and it’s a beast that’s not merely an iterative update to the Xbox One, but could be considered a full blown next generation system that will also play existing Xbox 360 and Xbox One games. Time for a specs roll call: 8 custom x86 cores at 2.3GHz, 40 AMD GPU cores, 12GB GDDR5 memory at 326GB per second, a 1TB hard drive and a 4K UHD capable Blu-ray. All specs top anything currently on the market, by a good amount, so this will be an impressive workhorse. Read more at kotaku.com.

Tech News Today with Megan Morrone and Jason Howell streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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