Digital Week in Review: Facebook Gets Progressive, Philanthropic Tech Billionaires, and @SochiProblems

In this week’s Digital Week in Review: Facebook makes a progressive move by letting users customize their genders, tech billionaires prove to be very philanthropic, and @SochiProblems has more followers than The Official @Sochi2014.

Facebook Makes Progressive Move

Facebook announced yesterday that users will now have the ability to customize their gender on their Facebook page. Currently this feature is only available in the United States but it will be expanded to other countries in the near future. This change came about after Facebook had been working closely with LGBT activist groups and decided to provide new progressive options for those who don’t feel they identify with a strictly male or female option.

To customize your gender, instead of selecting male or female, you can choose “custom”. Custom allows you to choose from 10 other gender definitions such as “cisgender”, “transgender” and “intersex”. This new feature also allows users to choose how they would like to be referred to (i.e his, her, she, he, their, they). For example, “It is John Smith’s birthday today. Wish (he/she/them) a Happy Birthday!”.

Philanthropic Tech Billionaires

Seventy five percent of 2013’s most philanthropic people under the age of 50 were tech billionaires, and they gave generously.

Mark Zuckerburg and Pricilla Chan donated nearly a billion dollars to various charities including 100 million dollars to Newark’s public schools and nearly a billion dollars in Facebook stock was given to The Silicon Valley foundation.

Pierre Omiyard, founder of eBay, has invested heavily in political organizations, such as civil liberties-oriented news organization, The Incept. Omydiar donated $250 million dollars to this organization.

Sergey Brin, founder of Google, and wife Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23 and Me, also donated a cool 219 million dollars to various charities in 2013.

The @SochiProblems Has More Followers Than Official @Sochi2014

The @SocihiProblems Twitter account has over a hundred thousand more followers The Official @Sochi2014 account. The amount of comical horror stories coming out of this year’s winter Olympics has spawned a Twitter sensation of those sharing their own funny stories. Currently the @SochiProblems account has approximately 343,000 followers, while The Official account only has 242,000.

In case you haven’t seen any of the Sochi 2014 mishappenings click here.