Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed.

The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU.

Just about a year ago we noted how Facebook was taking some heat on the security and privacy fronts for pitching a "privacy protecting" VPN to consumers that actually violated consumer privacy.

A wide variety of different news outlets were quick to point out that Facebook was actually using the "privacy" app to track users around the internet when they wandered away from Facebook, then using that data to its own competitive advantage.

Facebook continued to market and push the VPN as a privacy tool while undermining the whole point of said privacy tool.

YouTube said in a blog post Thursday that over the past week it had already shut off comments for “tens of millions of videos” that could be subject to predatory behavior. Now, it will expand that to suspend comments on virtually all videos featuring young minors, as well as videos featuring older kids that “could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior.”

Everything was going well. Every once in a while, people would post a review or a comment here and there about Luxsport Motor Group. From time to time we received notarized letters from the posters who wanted to remove their reviews posted by mistake. Nothing suspicious. Until fraud was discovered.

There is fraud and falsification going on somewhere in here. Maybe notary’s signature is a fake? Maybe the company, Luxsport Motor Group, is hiding something? Maybe these notarized letters are fabricated altogether?

Any discussions related to Devotion are currently banned in Chinese gaming forums, which includes NGA.Cn, China’s leading video games forum. Recent reviews of the game have taken a drastic negative turn, the majority of them being from Chinese players.

If the concerned authority of the People’s Republic of China finds out about the discussed controversy, not just will they ban the game, but there’s a possibility they’ll ban Steam entirely.

Devotion has been completely pulled out of Steam following the controversy.

Windstream's losing court battle was against hedge fund Aurelius Capital Management, "which had argued a two-year-old spinoff of the company's fiber-optic cable network violated the covenants on one of its bonds," which prohibited "sale-leaseback transactions," The Wall Street Journal wrote today.

Despite choosing not to appeal, CEO Thomas said that "Windstream strongly disagrees" with the court decision, and accused Aurelius of "engag[ing] in predatory market manipulation to advance its own financial position."

GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming will give a rare speech on Monday emphasising the need for better cyber-security practices in the telecoms industry.

In December, MI6 chief Alex Younger raised questions over China's role in the UK tech sector, and a recent report from the Royal United Services Institute said it would be "naive" and "irresponsible" to allow Huawei access.

PepsiCo has kicked off a round of layoffs impacting employees in multiple offices, two people who were laid off by the company told Business Insider.

PepsiCo also recently announced plans to restructure the organization and "relentlessly" invest in automation.

"Our second set of priorities ... involves becoming more capable, leaner, more agile and less bureaucratic," CEO Ramon Laguarta said.

Code buried in Instagram for Android shows the company has prototyped an option to create public “Collections” to which multiple users can contribute.

People could use the feature to bundle together their favorite memes, travel destinations, fashion items or art.

The move comes after some marketers pulled ads from the platform because they didn't know they were appearing with videos that discourage vaccinations.

"We have strict policies that govern what videos we allow ads to appear on, and videos that promote anti-vaccination content are a violation of those policies," a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement. "We enforce these policies vigorously, and if we find a video that violates them, we immediately take action and remove ads."