10 things in tech you need to know today, August 22

Azealia Banks demanded that Elon Musk return her
phone.
Getty

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this
Wednesday.

1.
Facebook says Iran-backed accounts pretended to be news
organizations to spread misinformation and to launch cyber
attacks. Facebook says it removed 652 Pages and
accounts on its services that it linked to Iran, as well as
numerous Russia-linked accounts involved in inauthentic behavior.

2.
Y Combinator, a startup program that’s harder to get into than
Harvard, accepted all 15,000 applicants into Startup School after
a major screwup. After initially informing some
startups that they had been mistakenly accepted, it then did a
U-turn and said all applicants had been accepted to its online
course for entrepreneurs.

3.
Tim Cook donated nearly $5 million worth of Apple shares to
charity. Cook has donated 23,215 Apple shares
to an unspecified charity, according to an SEC filing on Tuesday.

4. Rapper
Azealia Banks is demanding Elon Musk return her phone in an
ongoing saga between the pair. Banks suggested
in a now-deleted Instagram post that Musk’s attorney had seized
her phone.

5.
Amazon removed one of the best features from Amazon Prime, and
Twitch users are furious. Amazon’s incredibly
popular Prime service is losing a major benefit: ad-free Twitch
viewing.

6.
Slack raised a whopping $427 million to become a $7.1 billion
company. Slack, the popular work chat app, has
raised $427 million in venture capital at a valuation of more
than $7 billion, according to a news release.

7.
It looks as if Elon Musk has deleted his Instagram
account. The Tesla CEO’s Instagram account has
vanished amid accusations from the rapper Azealia Banks.

8.
Facebook apologized to right-wing group PragerU after being
accused of censoring its videos. Facebook said
the removal of the videos was a mistake, but PragerU seemed
unconvinced, claiming the removal was an act of deliberate
censorship.

9.
Uber appointed a new chief financial officer as it inches towards
an IPO. Uber announced on Tuesday that it had
appointed Nelson J. Chai, formerly of Merrill Lynch and
CIT Group.

10.
Israel won’t renew a $27 million contract with Microsoft because
it says switching to the cloud subscription model will double the
price. The Israeli government announced on
Tuesday that it will not renew its desktop software contract with
Microsoft.

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