Retail Spending Dips For 3rd Straight Month As Infections Surge Restaurants and bars are reeling from persistent spikes of coronavirus cases. Earlier holiday sales also meant online shopping and electronics sales dipped in December. Retail sales fell 0.7%. Alina Selyukh
Twitter CEO Tweets About Banning Trump From Site Twitter kicked President Donald Trump off of its site following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. CEO Jack Dorsey said major corporations have too much power and pose a risk to a "free" Internet. Jaclyn Diaz
YouTube Joins Twitter, Facebook In Taking Down Trump's Account After Capitol Siege The move, which suspends the president's account for a week, comes after the video platform said a livestream of his remarks on Tuesday violated YouTube's community standards. Jaclyn Diaz
British Tech Company Unveils Robotic Kitchen Assistant Moley Robotics unveiled a kitchen robot that can cook 5,000 recipes from scratch. The robot has arms, hands, cameras, and sensors that enable it to prepare full meals. It even does the dishes.
Parler sues Amazon after the tech giant boots the app from its servers ‘Laws about social media that oversee what is allowed, or is not allowed, are really old and long predate this form of technology.’ Kim Malcolm
Tech Giants Join Corporate Reckoning Over Political Spending Money-in-politics groups welcomed this unusually wide-spread — and self-initiated — reckoning by corporations over their own role in contributing to the nation's current political state. Alina Selyukh
Facebook Taps Former Obama Official As Vice President Of Civil Rights Roy Austin Jr. will fill the new position, which was created by Facebook after a scathing audit released in July 2020 concluded the company's policies had caused "serious setbacks for civil rights." Brakkton Booker
Parler Sues Amazon, Seeking To Restore Web Service "Over the past several weeks, we've reported 98 examples to Parler of posts that clearly encourage and incite violence," Amazon Web Services said, according to court documents. Bill Chappell
Social Media Companies Are Banning Trump. Why Now? Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks to social media researcher Jennifer Grygiel about why social media companies didn't react sooner to President Trump's online presence.
Amazon And Apple Drop Parler Amazon said it was removing Parler from its web hosting service, while Apple said it suspended the social media app from its store. Both companies said Parler allowed violent threats to go unchecked. Emma Bowman
