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The European Union’s top diplomat said on Sunday Russia and China were hampering a united international response to Myanmar’s military coup and that the EU could offer more economic incentives if democracy returns to the country.

Twitch will now ban users who harass members of its community — even when that harassment takes place off Twitch. The streaming platform announced a major expansion of its off-service misconduct policy today that allows it to take action against users who mistreat people regardless of where it happens, whether it’s offline or on another social platform.

Google today open-sourced Lyra in beta, an audio codec that uses machine learning to produce high-quality voice calls. The code and demo, which are available on GitHub, compress raw audio down to 3 kilobits per second for “quality that compares favorably to other codecs,” Google says.

The platform includes virtual meetings with doctors through the app and in-person care at a patient’s home. It can dispatch nurses to someone’s door to draw blood or perform a physical examination. Amazon launched the program for its Seattle-area employees in 2019.

The social media company, which lawmakers and researchers have criticised for allowing vaccine misinformation to spread on its platforms, said in a blog post that measures were now in place to check that.

Alphabet’s Google will not build or use alternate tools to track web browsing traffic once it begins phasing out existing technology from its Chrome browser next year, it said in a blog post on Wednesday, in a move that will reshape how online advertising works.

Google is releasing a developer preview for the next version of Android, Android 12, for Pixel devices today. As is the norm for Google, the very first previews of Android are full of a lot of developer-facing changes. Android 12 has updates to how the OS handles images, video, and future security updates.

Facebook has blocked Australian users from sharing or viewing news content on the platform, causing much alarm over public access to key information.

Amazon has filed a lawsuit against the New York state attorney general’s office as a preemptive effort to prevent legal action over the company’s handling of COVID-19 conditions at a Staten Island warehouse last spring. Amazon is seeking an injunction preventing the attorney general’s office from trying to exercise “regulatory authority over workplace safety responses to COVID-19 and claims of retaliation against workers who protest working conditions.”

Twitter has refused an order from the Indian government to block certain Twitter accounts, including ones from politicians, activists, and journalists that were critical of the government’s response to a protest carried out in the country’s capital in January.

Instagram is toughening its stance on hate speech in direct messages. The company announced today that it’ll start disabling the accounts of people who repeatedly send hateful messages. First-time offenders won’t be able to send messages for an undefined period of time, but if they send hateful messages again, their account will be disabled.

Facebook plans to test how people respond to seeing fewer posts about politics in the News Feed. Starting this week, Facebook will “temporarily reduce” political posts for a “small percentage” of people in Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia, with a test in the US following some weeks later. The tests will continue for the next few months.

Brokerage Public.com said on Monday it would no longer route orders to market makers to execute trades and instead send them directly to exchanges, in an attempt to remove a potential conflict of interest with its customers.

Hong Kong Secretary of Justice Teresa Cheng reiterated on Saturday that Britain had no rights over the city under the joint declaration that laid the blueprint for how the city would be ruled after its 1997 reunification with China.

“....the required amount we had to deposit with the clearing house was so large - with individual volatile securities accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in deposit requirements - that we had to take steps to limit buying in those volatile securities to ensure we could comfortably meet our requirements,” it said in a blog post late on Friday.

Google’s iPhone apps such as Maps and YouTube will stop using a tool from Apple Inc that allows them to personalize ads, avoiding a new Apple warning that informs users their browsing is being tracked.

Twitter has launched its Birdwatch program, meant to address misinformation on the platform by allowing users to fact-check tweets, the company announced Monday. Users in the pilot program, which will only include about 1,000 users in the US to start, will eventually be able to add notes to tweets to provide context.

Alphabet Inc is shutting down Loon after concluding the business, which offers balloons as an alternative to cell towers, is not commercially viable, Google’s parent company said on Thursday.

The smartphone app, a huge hit across the world, cancelled its February 8 deadline for accepting an update to its terms concerning sharing data with Facebook, saying it would use the pause to clear up misinformation around privacy and security.

WhatsApp on Friday announced a three-month delay of a new privacy policy originally slated to go into effect on February 8th following widespread confusion over whether the new policy would mandate data sharing with Facebook.

Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, on Wednesday backed the messaging platform’s ban of US President Donald Trump, but said it sets a “dangerous” precedent and represents a failure to promote healthy conversation on social networks.

Microsoft security researchers said today that Russian hackers managed to access more of its network than the company originally believed. However, the company emphasized that even in this case it still did not detect any damage to its systems.