Hashtag Trends Sept. 30 – Amazon Raises Wages. Google shuts down Stadia, Instagram bans Pornhub

Amazon is raising wages for frontline workers, Google is closing stadiums, and Instagram is banning Pornhub accounts.

Welcome to hashtag trending. Friday, September 30th, this is Tom Li, your host.

Amazon has announced it will raise wages for US workers. The e-commerce giant said the change would raise average wages for warehouse and transportation workers to more than $19 an hour. Non-U.S. employees retain their previous base salary, which is approximately $15 an hour. The salary increase will cost the company about $1 billion annually. That’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what it makes.In 2021 alone, Amazon made her $469 billion in revenue.

sauce: Yahoo Finance

It looks like the game streaming bet didn’t pay off for Google as the company announced the shutdown of Stadia.As part of the shutdown, Google will refund all Stadia purchases, including hardware, software and DLC. A full shutdown will take place on January 18, 2023. Stadia general manager Phil Harrison said in his blog post that the service didn’t get the traction the company had hoped. The Verge reports that Stadia employees will take on new roles in other parts of the company, and existing technology will be migrated to other projects.

sauce: The Barge

Instagram has permanently banned Pornhub’s account after repeated violations of its community guidelines. In response, Pornhub posted an open letter on his Meta, explaining that Instagram’s actions were opaque, discriminatory and hypocritical. The account had already been suspended three weeks before his permanent ban. Instagram says all accounts are subject to the same moderation standards, whether they are celebrities or not. Additionally, an Instagram spokeswoman said they would never deactivate an account just because it is owned by an adult creator.

sauce: tech crunch

Hollywood star Bruce Willis has apparently allowed an AI company to create a ‘digital twin’ of himself for use in movies. The actor is said to have signed US company Deepcake for the rights to overlay his face on other performers. Especially for movie stars, building a digital twin has several advantages. It can still be used if an actor dies or to maintain their appearance at a certain age. In the case of Bruce Willis, he had to step away from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia.To date he has appeared in over 70 films, including Die His Hard. Known for his role in

sauce: Telegraph

That’s all the tech news trending right now. Hashtag Trending is part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or Google Home Daily Briefing. Sign up for the Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the important news straight to your inbox every day. Also, check out the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which airs every Thursday morning. If you have any suggestions or tips, let us know in the comments or email us. Thanks for listening, I’m Tom Lee.