When Donald Trump won the US presidential election last November, Facebook came under scrutiny for its role in spreading fake news stories and other propaganda believed to have been helpful to Mr Trump.
At that stage, Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared to dismiss the suggestion that his company could have swung the election as a "crazy idea".
Now Mr Zuckerberg seems to have changed his stance quite radically. In a video broadcast on his own Facebook page he announced a range of measures to tighten up political advertising on the platform, and said he would hand over to Congress details of 3,000 political adverts that were paid for from Russian accounts during the campaign.
Mr Zuckerberg's statement has been met with a stinging response on Twitter by President Trump, who wrote: "The Russia hoax continues, now it's ads on Facebook." Mr Trump also took the opportunity to attack the media once again for "totally biased and dishonest coverage" of his rival Hillary Clinton.
Although Google sells its own-brand, high-end smartphone, the Pixel, it's well-known to many that the device is actually supplied by the Taiwanese handset-maker HTC. And when trading in HTC's shares was suspended this week, the rumour mill went into overdrive. Many suspected that Google was about to take over the whole firm - or maybe its very successful virtual reality business. But in the event the search giant unveiled a rather smaller deal, paying $1.1bn (£800m) to acquire the team of HTC engineers building the Google Pixel phone. But what does this say about HTC, once a major player in mobile phones?
Our reporter in Taiwan, Cindy Sui, told me that HTC was considered a national pride and joy, a brand that elevated Taiwan from being just a place to manufacture other companies' products, and that the firm was unlikely to give up on its handset business.
It may even be looking to invest the money from Google into further handset research and development, she said, although selling around half of its phone engineers to Google might just end up creating even stronger competition for HTC.
Our special guest Ian Fogg, from research firm IHS Markit, observed that with this deal, Google is "de-risking" its own smartphone business, so that despite declining fortunes for HTC, the Pixel will not be affected by HTC's ultimate fate.