Twitter

Fueling the right-wing conspiracy theorist's view that the world is out to get him, Twitter has followed the lead of other social media companies and banned Alex Jones from its platform.

With his output dubbed "hate content", Jones found himself removed from Spotify, Facebook and iTunes, but Twitter's Jack Dorsey previously refused to follow suit saying that the Infowars frontman "hasn't violated our rules", insisting that his company enforces its rules "impartially, regardless of political viewpoints". But after Jones posted videos earlier this week that violated Twitter's policy on abusive content, he has been permanently banned.

Donald Trump has accused Google of rigging its search results so that "good news" about the president is drowned out by unfavorable stories from the "Fake News Media".

Using his preferred medium of Twitter, he alleged that 96 percent of search results for "Trump News" were from the "National Left-Wing Media", something he described as "very dangerous". Google denied these  accusations of political bias, saying searching results are controlled by constantly-updated algorithms.

Starting tomorrow -- Thursday, August 16 -- Twitter is disabling push notifications for third party clients. If you use the likes of Twitterific, Fenix or Plume, this could mean you miss out on important messages as Twitter clamps down on what third party tools are able to do.

Twitter has long had a tempestuous relationship with app developers, including its frankly bizarre token limit which effectively restricts the number of users any app can ever attract. This latest move is billed as a part of a security drive, but it's one that will impact a large number of people. There is something you can do to ensure you get Twitter notifications on your iPhone or Android handset, but it's not ideal.

Alex Jones and Infowars are being banned, suspended and removed from the internet left, right and center. But while YouTube, Facebook, Apple and others have come down hard on the right-wing conspiracy theorist for peddling hate speech, Twitter is standing by him.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has defended his company's decision not to follow the lead of its Silicon Valley counterparts, saying that Alex Jones "hasn't violated our rules". In a series of tweets, Dorsey explains that Twitter enforces its rules "impartially, regardless of political viewpoints".

How do you know if you're reading tweets from a real person or a bot? As bot technology becomes more sophisticated it's increasingly hard to tell.

Researchers at Duo Security have collected and analyzed data from 88 million public Twitter accounts using machine learning to spot the tactics used by malicious bots to appear legitimate and avoid detection.

Twitter users can no longer automatically cross-post to Facebook. The restriction has come about after Facebook made changes to the way third parties are able to make use of its APIs.

It means that Twitter users who have connected their Facebook account to make it easier to post the same content on both services via Facebook Login can't have their tweets automatically posted to Facebook. The -- rather unsatisfactory -- solution from Twitter is simply copy the URL of a tweet, and this can then be manually posted to Facebook.

As part of its continuing attempts to clean up its platform, Twitter has announced that it is going to apply its rules more strictly on Periscope. Starting in mid-August users who repeatedly post abusive comments or harass others run the risk of being banned.

Twitter will enforce its guidelines more aggressively during live broadcasts. The company says that it will "review and suspend accounts for repeatedly sending chats that violate" its rules.

Microsoft's Dona Sarkar has taken to Twitter to share Surface Go unboxing videos.

Due for release next week -- August 2, to be precise -- the Surface Go was revealed just a couple of weeks ago. Microsoft has already shared a few videos of its upcoming tablet on YouTube, but the new videos show Dona Sarkar and Brandon LeBlanc from the Windows Insider team getting hands on.

Out of the blue today, Donald Trump took to his favorite medium of Twitter to complain that the company was "shadow banning" prominent Republicans -- and it wasn't long before Donald Trump Jr sided with his father.

The allegations stem from a Vice article that suggested Twitter was limiting the visibility of searches for key Republican figures -- something Twitter denies. The company says that a bug is to blame and it is actively working on addressing it.

As part of its continuing efforts to clean up the platform, Twitter has removed 143,000 apps in the last three months for policy violations. To help reduce the need for such measures in the future, the company has also introduced a new registration system that means developers must now request access to Twitter's APIs.

The change is a significant one, and with it Twitter will be hoping to prevent the appearance of malicious apps in the first place -- making its job easier and improving the overall experience for users.

Twitter: you either love it or hate it. Even if you're a Twitter lover, there's probably plenty you dislike about it! People have complained about tweets being too short, and Twitter fixed this. People complained about not being verified, and Twitter (temporarily, at least) opened up verification to everyone. People have complained about not being about to edit tweets -- and Twitter has done nothing about it.

But that's not to say someone hasn't been working on a solution. Using a new Chrome extension, you can effectively gain the ability to edit your tweets and save yourself the embarrassment of a typo in your timeline.

Four giants of the technology world have joined forces in an attempt to make it easier for people to move data between services. The collaboration between Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter takes the form of the open source Data Transfer Project, the aim of which is to make it possible to "transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it".

The four companies joining announced the data portability platform which currently makes use of public APIs to offer support for photos, mail, contacts, calendars and tasks from the founders as well as other companies who are encouraged to get involved.

It's just days since the Europe hit Google with a record fine for what it described as "very serious illegal behavior" in an antitrust case about the company's abuse of Android to dominate the competition.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people have an opinion not only about the way Google has acted, but also of the European commission's ruling itself. Among those with an opinion to share is none other than Donald Trump who used the fine as a way to paint the US as a victim at the hands of Europe.

Attaining a blue tick of verification remains a goal for many Twitter users, but it remains elusive for most. It is quite some time since Twitter paused the option for anyone to request verification, and now the company has revealed that opening it back up is far from a priority.

The idea behind pausing the application process was to give the company the opportunity to work on fixing what was seen as a broken verification system. Product lead Kayvon Beykpour says that Twitter doesn't have the "bandwidth" to sort things out right now, and instead needs to concentrate on sorting out election integrity in the run-up to the US mid-term elections.

Over the coming week, you may well notice that you lose a number of Twitter followers. Don't worry, it's (probably) not the result of something you said -- Twitter is having a spring clean and is cutting locked accounts from follower numbers.

The company says that the change is being introduced so that everyone's follower counts are "meaningful and accurate" and that they are something people can have confidence in. So just how many followers are you likely to lose?