Happy New Year!

It's great to be back to kick off 2021 -- and already there's no shortage of topics to discuss.

While the storming of the US Capitol dominated coverage last week, Ewan focused on some news that flew under the radar: Google staff are unionizing. Actually, that's not entirely true, but a group of staff at the search engine giant has taken its first steps towards collective bargaining. Ewan walks us through what happened and why it matters.

We couldn't ignore the biggest news of the week, so Cam looked at how Facebook handled the insurrection which rocked Washington. Facebook has long been under fire for questionable -- and sometimes violent -- content uploaded by its users. Its flimsy pretext, that it's a "platform" and not a "publisher", finally collapsed completely on January 6. We examine Facebook's public handling of the protest and how it communicated privately to staff (hint: it wasn't good).

In Check This Out, Cam mentioned a brand new podcast (at least to him) that he fell in love with over the holidays, while Ewan recommends a weightier documentary that has close parallels to the 2020 US election.

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Links and Show Notes

• Maryland Company Terminates Employee Who Participated in US Capitol Riot - Twitter
• 'This is Historic': Google, Alphabet Workers Form First-Ever Union - Human Resources Director
• What Can a Small Union for Well-Paid Google Workers Accomplish? Quite a Bit, Experts Say - MSN
• Mark Zuckerberg Explains Ban of US President in a Status Update - Facebook
• Trump Blocked on Facebook Indefinitely, Suspended by Twitter as Tech Platforms Finally Take Action - Salon
• Facebook Forced its Employees to Stop Discussing