The Senate Judiciary Committee is planning to issue a subpoena to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey after the company blocked users from sharing unverified New York Post articles about former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. On Oct. 20, the committee will hold a vote over sending a subpoena that would require Dorsey to appear by Oct. 23.

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• On Wednesday, the New York Post published a story claiming Joe Biden's son Hunter was paid to set up a meeting between the then-VP and a Ukrainian oil executive. Users who tried to tweet the link were shown the message: "We can't complete this request because the link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful."
• Facebook did not prohibit the sharing of the article but limited its distribution until it could be verified by an independent third party.
• Republican Sen. Josh Hawley wanted the committee to issue a subpoena to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as well, though it is unknown if he will be included in Tuesday's vote.
• Dorsey and Zuckerberg are already scheduled to appear in front of the Senate Commerce Committee alongside Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Oct. 28. The three men will testify about liability protections, media consolidation, and data privacy.
• On Wednesday evening, Dorsey tweeted that Twitter's handling of the situation was "unacceptable." Twitter clarified that it banned the NY Post story from tweets as it violated its rules on sharing private information and hacked materials.

Undergraduate enrollment in universities and colleges fell due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data of 9.2 million students from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows a 16.1% decrease amongst first-year students, and a 4% decrease overall.

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• The WSJ cites health concerns, financial constraints, and lack of a desire from students to attend online classes for the decline.
• The number of women enrolled fell by 2.2%, compared to 6.4% among men. Indigenous students had the largest decline of 10.7%, followed by Black students at 7.9%. International students saw a 13.7% drop in undergraduate enrollment.
• Private, nonprofit colleges saw an 11.8% decrease amongst first-year students and a 1.8% decrease overall. Four-year public schools had a 13.7% decrease amongst freshmen and a 2% decrease overall.
• Community colleges were hit the hardest, as they experienced a 22.7% decline in first-year student enrollment. Normally during difficult economic periods, community colleges see an increase. However, expectations of a quick recovery may have negatively impacted enrollment.

A major hack of high-profile Twitter accounts in July was the result of poor cybersecurity by Twitter, concluded a report by the New York State Department of Financial Services. The regulator said that the hackers accessed Twitter's internal systems and pretended to be from the company's IT department. The hackers, led by a 17-year-old, were able to compromise the accounts of former President Barack Obama, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, among others, and run a bitcoin scam that netted them $118,000 as a result.

More from the report:

• The attacker did not use any sophisticated attack methods such as malware or backdoors.
• Instead, the hackers said that they were responding to problems with the employee's virtual private network and harvested credentials when the employee visited a bogus Twitter VPN website.
• The Twitter attack underscores the need for strong cybersecurity to provide social media platforms from being weaponized during the election.

This story first appeared in Inside Security. You can read the full issue here. 

Spotify launched a new feature that combines audio content with music. This format is exclusive only to certain podcasts on Spotify. 

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• Shows in this new format play as a mix of the music used in the podcast and the audio itself. Each compatible episode has an "Explore Episode" feature that allows the listener to split the listening into audio and music. 
• While Spotify Premium members can listen to the full track, the free tier subscribers can only listen to 30-second music previews. 
• Anchor by Spotify now allows you to create shows in this format. 
• Spotify launched seven original shows in differing genres using this new format. These include "Halleloo Happy Hour with DJ Shangela" with Shangela of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, "Murder Ballads" – which explores the folklore behind America’s "most mysterious and violent" songs – and a show exploring the theories surrounding famous artists, "Conspiracy Theories: Music Edition."

This story first appeared in Inside Podcasting. You can read the full issue here. 

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• 8 million Americans have fallen into fallen into poverty since May after federal aid from the CARES Act passed in March ran out.
• Billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio has pledged $50m to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital to help reduce health inequalities during the pandemic.
• Daryl Morey resigned as general manager of the NBA's Houston Rockets. His 2019 tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters led to China severing ties with the NBA until the recently-concluded finals.
• As Apple device adoption grows in the enterprise, organizations are looking for ways to seamlessly manage and secure devices while extending the world-class Apple experience users expect.*

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