• Facebook and Twitter have penalised Donald Trump and his campaign for posts in which the president claimed children were “almost immune” to coronavirus.
• Facebook deleted the post that contained a clip from an interview  the President gave to Fox News – saying it contained “harmful Covid misinformation”. This is the first time Facebook has chosen to remove one of President Trump’s posts. 
• Twitter followed by saying it had frozen a Trump campaign account until a tweet of the same clip was removed.
• A Facebook spokesperson said on Wednesday evening: “This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation.”

• A court hearing for the Florida teenager accused of being behind last month’s major Twitter hack was repeatedly ‘zoombombed’ with pornography. 
• The 17-year-old was asking for a lower bail amount, after pleading not guilty to the charges on Tuesday, but Zoom users – changing their names to mimic CNN and BBC News employees – dropped in to the meeting uninvited.
• Florida newspaper the Tampa Bay Times reported that the “interruptions grew so frequent… Hillsborough Circuit Judge Christopher C Nash ended the Zoom hearing temporarily”. However, the interruptions resumed when the hearing did.
• Some attendees played music down the line. Another used Zoom’s screen-sharing feature to play pornography, which reporters said was the final straw that suspended the meeting.
• For more information on staying safe on Zoom and other platforms, check out our ABC’s of Video Conferencing.

• TikTok has said it plans to build a $500m (£375m) data centre in Ireland.
• It will store videos, messages and other data generated by European users from the short-form video-sharing app.
• Until now all of its users’ records were stored in the US, with a back-up copy held in Singapore.
• The announcement comes at a time when President Trump has threatened to ban the app in the US on the grounds its Chinese ownership makes it a national security risk, which TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company Bytedance denies.

• Instagram has launched Reels in the UK and is now available to use in the Instagram App. 
• Reels is Instagram’s answer to TikTok’s dominance of short term video sharing and lets users create short-form videos set to music that can be shared with friends and followers or discovered while browsing the app.
• Reels allows people to record videos up to 15 seconds long and add popular music, as well as an array of filters and effects over the top of them.
• For more information, check out our video on Reels here.

• Google has deleted more than 2,500 YouTube channels tied to China as part of its effort to weed out disinformation on the video-sharing platform.
• The company said the channels were removed between April and June “as part of our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.“
• The channels generally posted “spammy, non-political content,” but some touched on politics the company said in a quarterly bulletin on disinformation operations.
• The report comes as tensions between the US and China over technology and social media rise ahead of the US general election.

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