• President Donald Trump has told US firms they have 45 days to stop doing business with TikTok and WeChat, claiming the Chinese apps are a threat to national security.
• Mr Trump signed two executive orders targeting two of China’s biggest apps, signalling a major escalation in Washington’s stand-off with Beijing over its power in global technology.
• The announcement comes as Microsoft is in talks to buy TikTok ahead of a September deadline set by Mr Trump.
• The executive orders against the short-video sharing platform TikTok – owned by Chinese firm ByteDance and the messaging service WeChat – owned by the Tencent conglomerate is the latest measure in  the increasing stand-off   between the Trump administration campaign  and China.
•  The owners of Tik Tok are now considering legal action against the US and said it was “shocked” by the order from the President.

• Facebook has removed a small network of accounts operating from Romania that had been promoting the US President’s re-election campaign with stories about his support from conservatives, Black Americans, Christians and followers of the QAnon web of conspiracy theories.
• Many operators of the 35 Facebook and 88 Instagram accounts posed as Americans, and some managed Trump fan pages, running foul of the social network’s rules on what it calls coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
• The network had a small reach, with only 1,600 users following its Facebook pages and 7,200 tracking its Instagram accounts.

• The Fifa 21 video game will feature fewer player celebrations as EA Sports attempts to curb “toxic” behaviour among gamers.
• Players will no longer be able to use the “shushing” celebration, which was often used to gloat and stall games.
• Fifa 21’s lead gameplay producer Sam Rivera ‘we were told by the community that there’s toxic behaviours in the game, and we wanted to make sure we removed them’.
• The latest instalment of the Fifa video game series is due to be released in October.

• Twitter says it will no longer “amplify” tweets by state-controlled media organisations, by excluding them from its recommendation systems.
• Twitter will label media organisations “where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, political pressure or control over production and distribution”.
• The move means affected accounts are less likely to appear in search results, notifications and on a user’s timeline.
• The company will also label the accounts of government-linked media, as well as “key government officials” from China, France, Russia, the UK and US.
• Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua News will both be affected by the change.
• This change comes as the platform continues to boost transparency in a bid to tackle misinformation.

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