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It Takes Two, a co-operative game about a family break-up, and action title Returnal lead the way in the race for this year’s Bafta Games Awards.

They have each been nominated for eight of the famous golden masks.

Bafta has been recognising the cultural impact of games since 2004 and the awards are arguably the most prestigious in the gaming industry.

Ratchet and Clank, Forza Horizon 5, Psychonauts 2 and Deathloop have also been nominated in multiple categories.

After two virtual ceremonies during the Covid pandemic, this year will see a return to an in-person event in London on 7 April.

In a sign of the variety that is now on offer in the ever-growing gaming industry, you could not pick two more different titles than It Takes Two and Returnal.

The former, which picked up the main prize at last year’s Game Awards, is a throwback to gaming in the mid-1990s with it’s bright cartoon aesthetic and emphasis on local co-operative play.

With the dominance of online multiplayer gaming in recent years, the success of this title is an example of how players are calling for more experiences that allow them to connect with people in the same room. Heightened, no doubt, by the pandemic and lockdowns.

In the game, Cody and May are planning a divorce and their daughter Rose tries to bring them back together. Players must work with each other to solve a series of engaging puzzles. So successful has it been that the title’s developers are working on a movie version.

It has been nominated in categories like best game, artistic achievement and the “game beyond entertainment” category.

Returnal, on the other hand, is a dark, futuristic, psychological horror experience that involves frantic bursts of action.

The Playstation 5 exclusive makes the most of new console technology and has struck a chord with players for its compelling and challenging gameplay.

It was named game of the year at the Develop: Star Awards and has now been nominated in categories like best game, game design and technical achievement.

Sony bosses will be happy

Alongside Returnal, PlayStation bosses will be happy that two of its other exclusive games are among those with the most nominations.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, a game that is seen by some reviewers as one of the few titles to have made the most of the latest generation of consoles, has seven nominations.

Deathloop has five nominations, including best game. It has just missed out on winning big at various other ceremonies and will be a strong contender for the main prize.

The Bafta Games Awards love throwing up a surprise result. Last year, ancient Greece-themed action title Hades walked away with the main prize for best game.

Gaming’s cultural impact
The games industry is often seen, in mainstream press outlets, through the prism of its financial impact – worth £7bn to the UK economy.

The Bafta Games Awards gives the industry the opportunity to focus on the cultural impact gaming has on people’s lives.

Most winners will be selected by a panel of judges from the industry, but the public can vote for the EE Game of the Year Award.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale, Deathloop, It Takes Two, Metroid Dread, The Forgotten City and Unpacking are the six titles competing for the award.

Streaming giant Netflix has announced it has paused all future projects and acquisitions from Russia.

The company said it was assessing the impact of the current invasion of Ukraine.

Filming for the production of Russian language series Zato will be halted.

Elsewhere in tech, cloud computing company Oracle also said it has suspended operations in Russia.

The two companies are the latest US technology firms to take action against Russia as attacks on Ukraine’s cities have escalated.

On Tuesday, Apple also announced that it was halting sales in Russia.

Oracle’s announcement on Twitter came three hours after Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation tweeted the company, calling for support.

Deputy Minister Alexander Bornyakov told the Reuters news agency that Ukraine has sought help from 50 different companies – in a bid to apply pressure to Russia.

“More sanctions imposed, faster peace restored,” Borynakov said on social media.

In a tweet Oracle said: “On behalf of Oracle’s 150,000 employees around the world and in support of both the elected government of Ukraine and for the people of Ukraine”

In recent days, global brands including Shell, Nike, H&M and Boeing have cut ties or temporarily suspended sales in Russia.

Moscow has responded to foreign companies distancing themselves from Russia by temporarily restricting Russian asset sales by foreigners.

On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin met with the president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs to discuss how it would attempt to minimise the impact of sanctions announced so far.

Netflix would not comment on how many people use its streaming service in Russia.

Earlier this week, however, it confirmed in a report by Hollywood Reporter that it would not carry Russian state channels.

“Given the current situation, we have no plans to add these channels to our service,” a Netflix spokesperson told the magazine in a statement.

Under a law that only came into effect on 1 March, “audiovisual services” in the country with more than 100,000 users will be required to carry 20 major state television channels.

Apple has become the latest major firm to halt all product sales in Russia, in a widening corporate backlash to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

The iPhone giant said it was “deeply concerned” about the Russian invasion and stands with those “suffering as a result of the violence”.

Apple Pay and other services such as Apple Maps have also been limited.

Google has also removed Russian state-funded publishers such as RT from its features.

Mobile banking apps in Russian, such as Russia’s VTB Bank’s app, may soon not function fully on devices using Apple’s iOS operating system, according to news agency RIA.

Apple said in a statement that the firm had disabled both traffic and live incidents in Apple Maps in Ukraine as a “safety and precautionary measure for Ukrainian citizens”.

Last week, Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov published an open letter to Apple on Twitter, in which he asked Apple to cut Russia off from its products, services, and App Store.

Earlier, Google restricted news firms funded by the Russian government from advertising tools and some features on YouTube.

“We are committed to complying with all sanctions requirements and we continue to monitor the latest guidance,” the company wrote in a blog post.

The company also told the BBC that Google Pay had been limited in the country – for those using sanctioned banks. Google has not, however, blocked Google Pay in Russia.

Google also said “most of our services (like Search, Maps and YouTube) currently remain available in Russia, continuing to provide access to global information and perspectives.”

Apple is generally fairly good at keeping its head down when it comes to global affairs.

For example, it has faced criticism for not standing up to China over its treatment of Uyghurs.

This move then is significant, and unusual, by the iPhone maker.

One by one global brands have been moving to distance themselves from Russia – making the country look more and more isolated.

But it was by no means certain that Apple would make this move. The company had started to receive criticism for its relative silence on Ukraine.

The BBC had reached out to Apple for comment, but had not received a reply until this announcement.

There are many phone companies in Russia, and plenty of alternatives to Apple products.

People with iPhones will also still be able to use the App Store – the pause in sales will not have a huge immediate impact.

But as brands desert Russia, its citizens will begin to notice that products they used to buy, simply aren’t available anymore.

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Firms cutting off Russia
Meanwhile, the Finnish network equipment maker Nokia said it would stop deliveries to Russia to comply with sanctions imposed on the country following the invasion of Ukraine.

On Monday, Netflix also said it had “no plans” to add state-run channels to its Russian service. Russian regulations had required it to carry 20 free-to-air news, sports and entertainment channels in the country.

US sportswear giant Nike has also paused sales in Russia. An update to the company’s website showed that purchases online and on the app were unavailable in Russia because the firm said it could not guarantee delivery of goods to the country.

However, the website update directed customers to their nearest Nike stores.

The biggest shipping firms in the world, Danish Maersk and Geneva-based MSC, also suspended container shipping to and from the country on Tuesday. The UK has also banned ships from Russia in its updated sanctions.

Russia supplies a sixth of the world’s commodities so will now be cut off from a significant part of shipping trade.

Motorbike firm Harley-Davidson also suspended business and shipments of its bikes to Russia.

And US plane manufacturer Boeing Co said on Tuesday it was suspending parts, maintenance and technical support for Russian airlines – as well as major operations in Moscow after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Google has disabled live traffic data from being displayed on its Maps app in Ukraine.

The app displays this information by collecting anonymous data from Android smartphones, which shows how busy roads and different places are.

But it has now been switched off in the region temporarily to protect users.

Google confirmed the move to the BBC, having told Reuters it took the action for the safety of local communities, after consulting regional authorities.

Although traffic data has been disabled, normal maps navigation features are still functioning properly in the area.

Data like this has long been used by people involved in desktop detection surrounding significant events.

Open-source intelligence
OSINT, or open-source intelligence, involves ordinary people using data available online, such as information about traffic or satellite images, to piece together a picture of what’s happening on the ground.

For instance, live traffic data on Google Maps is updated as a result of smartphones sending anonymised location information to Google. If lots of phone signals seem to be slow-moving or stationary (because of being stuck in traffic) the app updates to indicate roads are congested.

Benjamin Strick, director of investigations for the Centre for Information Resilience, told the BBC that while this information is useful, it’s not giving us the full picture.

“It can be useful in verifying content to answer integral questions such as where something was filmed, where it happened, when it happened, and what’s in it,” he said.

“But sometimes that can be a little risky with misinterpretation.

“Some people might see a line of light on radar imagery, and assume it’s a traffic build-up. We’ve seen this online where people look at past imagery – and I’ve noticed that, actually, it’s just power lines.

“So that’s really tricky, because it can create headlines. It’s really important to just double-verify everything and question everything.”

Could phone signals show secret troop movements?
No and yes.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, open-source researchers have been poring over data from a variety of sources in an effort to better understand events as they unfold.

It’s unlikely that traffic data in Ukraine is being generated by mobile phones carried by military personnel though.

On 24 February, an open-source intelligence researcher in the United States combined satellite radar images and Google Maps traffic jam data from the Ukrainian border and concluded that the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces had begun.

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But Mr Strick explained that data showing heavy traffic build-up around cities could be explained by civilians, rather than armed forces.

“People might post that on Twitter, claiming that there might be a lot of Russian vehicles there,” he said.

“But that could also be people fleeing out of the area. It could be an old highway road that has never had a car for the past few months, and suddenly has three vehicles travelling in one direction.

“It doesn’t really mean it’s going to be similar to what you would see in the middle of New York City with a traffic build-up.”

What about keeping evacuees safe?
As data is provided in real-time, there is a question mark surrounding how to keep people in Ukraine safe while sharing intelligence online.

Google switching off live traffic data for Ukraine clearly helps with this, but Mr Strick says there are “a huge amount of risks” surrounding keeping people safe.

“Anyone can learn how to look at a video and see where someone is filming from, or what direction a person might be travelling. What we’ve really been trying to do is establish some ethics around that,” he said.

“There’s a bit of a game out there now, to geolocate things as quickly as possible and identify those locations. That’s a big concern at the moment.”

Valve’s new handheld PC, the Steam Deck, has officially been released – but only to a select few people.

The hardware was originally slated for release in December 2021, but was pushed back due to supply chain issues.

Despite the hardware having been released, many orders are only available “after Q2 2022”.

When asked if it would be able to fulfil these pre-orders, Valve president Gabe Newell pointed to unexpected high demand.

“The shortages are not due to supply shock, they’re due to a demand shock,” he said.

“It’s just this huge uptake in silicon consumption that caught everybody more or less flat-footed.”

On Friday, Valve started contacting people who pre-ordered Steam Decks on a first-come, first-served basis.

Customers have three days from receipt of the email from Valve to complete their purchase or lose their spot in the queue.

It is unclear when customers will receive their hardware, but Valve said it will begin shipping on 28 February.

The base version of the Steam Deck costs £349 and comes with 64GB flash storage, while the top-end version costs £569 and has 512GB of faster internal storage.

A big library of games
One of the clear selling points of the Steam Deck is its vast library of more than 62,000 games, with many titles playable in some form or another.

Greg Coomer, a designer at Valve, said this library was at the heart of the product’s inception.

“Our goal was to bring all the games on Steam to a handheld form factor, to be able to play even the triple A games in the library,” he said.

Unlike buying a new console, players who have accrued hundreds of PC games over their life will find many of them are immediately playable on the Steam Deck.

One section on the home screen will show you just how many of the games you own are considered to be “Great on Deck”, meaning the games fully support the hardware.

But this is not foolproof, as we experienced severe stuttering and slowdown in one of the selected games, the 2011 title Sonic Generations.

Meanwhile, many older titles are playable with issues. For example, Persona 4 Golden runs well on the handheld – as you would expect of a game originally released on PlayStation 2 and remastered for Sony’s handheld PlayStation Vita. However, it currently does not play audio during cut scenes, and has extended black screen delays exiting battles.

Despite having limited internal storage space, all versions of the Steam Deck are expandable by a MicroSD card. Mr Coomer said the hardware would not only support a 1TB MicroSD card, but he believed it would support any size that exists.

The Internals
A feature of the handheld is its battery life. Valve says it can hold charge for up to eight hours depending on use, although we were unable to find a game which ran for this length of time on default settings.

The battery time varies from game to game, with hit title Grand Theft Auto V lasting just under five hours with default graphics settings.

How a selection of games fared with battery life on default settings:

Control (2019) – three hours
Skyrim: Special Edition (2011, Special Edition released 2016) – four hours
Sims 4 (2014) – four hours
Persona 4: Golden (2012, PC version released 2020) – six hours
Fallout: New Vegas (2010) – six hours
According to Mr Coomer, parts of the Steam Deck – such as the battery – are “technically upgradeable”, while other parts are replaceable if players have an issue.

“But there’s a limit,” he said. “For example, it’s really hard to get the battery out if you need to replace that.

“You can upgrade parts, you can swap parts. Some parts are easier to swap than others. Mostly we don’t recommend that anyone do that themselves at home if they’re not already a pro at doing those kinds of things.”

Valve has said in the past it is “technically possible” the Steam Deck will support an external VR headset, but it is not optimised for it. And Mr Coomer would not elaborate on which VR games would run on the device.

“We have tried it out only just to vet whether some of the peripherals will light up,” he said. “We knew from the outset that we’re not going to have a fantastic experience with VR games running on Deck today.”

The Future
Valve has released several products in the hardware realm in the past, such as its 2015 Steam Machines.

The prebuilt gaming PCs were intended to compete with home consoles such as the Xbox and PlayStation, but were quietly removed from the Steam store in 2018, and are no longer available for sale.

It also released the Steam Controller and Steam Link, which Mr Newell points out are still supported despite being discontinued.

“All of those things have continued to be the building blocks for what we’re doing with Deck,” he said. “I think Deck is going to be an enormously popular product.

“We’d expect customers to be excited their Steam library is going to work on their desktop, even if they stop using their Deck. That’s a big advantage.”

He called the Steam Deck “the first stage of the next generation”.

“I’m playing Final Fantasy XIV on my Deck,” he said. “That’s something that traditionally would have been absurd.

“You’re not going to play that on your phone, right? It would be impossible that you throw away everything that makes it a fun game in order to get it to run in that kind of environment.”

And he said Valve isn’t too concerned about big sales figures, comparing the hardware to its 2020 VR release Half-Life: Alyx.

“Was Alyx a huge financial success? No,” he said. “Because the number of devices where you can play it is a vast subset of the number of PC titles.

“Does that mean in any way, shape, or form that we’re disappointed with Alyx? Not at all, because we’re in this for the long haul.

“Our view is, narrowly viewing everything in terms of strict unit volumes precludes a lot of interesting choices.”

The Steam Deck seems destined to be compared to the wildly popular Nintendo Switch, which has surpassed 100 million sales worldwide.

But from a consumer’s point of view, the handheld PC does offer something dramatically different – every single game that can be purchased on the Steam Deck remains in your Steam library to be played in the future long after the hardware no longer functions.

So perhaps the most intriguing thing about the Steam Deck that separates it from other consoles is not just that it already has a vast library – it’s that its library will live on.

Russia has limited access to Facebook over the platform’s stance on the accounts of several Moscow-backed news outlets amid the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor accused the network of “censorship” and violating “the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens”.

Facebook said it had refused to stop fact-checking and labelling content from state-owned news organisations.

The move came a day after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine.

It is unclear what the regulator restrictions mean, or to what extent Facebook’s parent company Meta’s other platforms – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram – are affected.

The regulator had demanded Facebook lift the restrictions it placed on Thursday on state news agency RIA, state TV channel Zvezda, and pro-Kremlin news sites Lenta.Ru and Gazeta.Ru.

It said that Meta had “ignored” these requests.

Sir Nick Clegg, vice-president of global affairs at Meta, said Russian authorities “ordered us to stop the independent fact-checking and labelling” the outlets’ content.

“We refused,” he said.

But he made clear he wanted Russians to continue to use Meta’s platforms.

“Ordinary Russians are using our apps to express themselves and organise for action”, Sir Nick said, and the company wants “them to continue to make their voices heard”.

Many state-owned media outlets in Russia have painted a largely positive picture of Russian military advances in Ukraine, calling the invasion a “special military operation” that had been forced on Moscow.

On Thursday Meta said it had set up a “special operations centre” to monitor content about the conflict in Ukraine.

Russia has its own Facebook equivalents, VK and Odnoklassniki, but Facebook is also popular in the country – as is Meta-owned Instagram.

On Friday, US Senator Mark Warner said Facebook, YouTube and other social media services had “a clear responsibility to ensure that your products are not used to facilitate human rights abuses”.

Meta, has been under pressure to label misinformation – and has been working with outside fact-checkers, including Reuters.

Moscow has also increased pressure on domestic media, threatening to block reports that contain what it describes as “false information” regarding its invasion of Ukraine.

Twitter also told the BBC that its safety and integrity teams were “disrupting attempts to amplify false and misleading information and to advance the speed and scale of our enforcement”.

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled several ambitious artificial-intelligence projects, describing AI as “the key to unlocking the Metaverse”.

In a livestreamed demonstration, he created a basic virtual world – including an island, trees and a beach – using the AI feature Builder Bot.

Mr Zuckerberg also announced a plan to build a universal speech translator.

“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language is a superpower that was dreamt of forever,” he said.

Builder Bot was part of Meta’s CAIRaoke project to improve AI assistants and allow “AI to see the world from our experience” as people entered virtual reality via headsets or glasses, Mr Zuckerberg said.

And he promised the AI systems driving Meta’s virtual worlds would preserve privacy and be transparent and responsible.

Facebook has been investing in AI for the past 10 years and has one of the world’s leading experts, Yann LeCun as its head of AI.

In January it announced that it had built a new AI supercomputer that it aims to be the fastest in the world when completed in mid 2022.

Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta in October, following revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen.

At the time, Mr Zuckerberg talked of a wide-ranging Metaverse – accessible via VR headsets, such as the Meta Quest, formerly Oculus -where people could work, play and chat.

And Meta plans to hire 10,000 people in Europe to help build it.

There has been much hype of its potential.

But critics have asked whether big corporations should be allowed to dominate the creation of such worlds – and how safe users would be.

‘Unwanted interactions’
One of Facebook’s earliest investors, Roger McNamee, told BBC News the company should be prevented from creating a “dystopian” Metaverse, given how its social network had failed to keep user data private or avoid misinformation and hate speech.

Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth admitted the Metaverse would be much harder to moderate than existing digital platforms, especially given its long-term goal of lots of companies interacting in the same space.

But he promised to allow users to control the experience.

And following reports women felt harassed in Meta VR platform Horizon Worlds, the company hastily introduced a feature called Personal Boundary to protect avatars from “unwanted interactions”.

A cyber rapid-response team (CRRT) is being deployed across Europe, after a call for help from Ukraine.

The newly formed team of eight to 12 experts, from Lithuania, Croatia, Poland, Estonia, Romania, and the Netherlands, has committed to help defend Ukraine from cyber-attacks – remotely and on site in the country.

An official warned attacks were likely.

“We can see that cyber-measures are an important part of Russia’s hybrid toolkit,” the CRRT official said.

It comes after the UK and the US blamed Russia for cyber-attacks earlier this month that temporarily took a small number of Ukrainian banking and government websites offline.

The Lithuanian Ministry of Defence tweeted: “In response to Ukraine request, [we] are activating [a] Lithuanian-led cyber rapid-response team, which will help Ukrainian institutions to cope with growing cyber-threats. #StandWithUkraine.”

CRRTs are a European Union initiative to deepen defence and co-operation between member states.

They are said to be equipped with commonly developed cyber-toolkits designed to detect, recognise and mitigate cyber-threats.

An official said the team was “composed of different cyber-expertise, such as incident response, forensics, vulnerability assessment, to be able to react to a variety of scenarios”.

Russia has previously been accused of so-called hybrid warfare, combining cyber-attacks with traditional military activity, in Georgia and Crimea.

The EU and Ukraine blamed Russia after thousands of people in multiple cities in Ukraine experienced power cuts, in 2015 and 2016, when hackers temporarily shut off electricity substations.

The US, UK and EU also blamed it for the hugely disruptive NotPetya wiper attack.

Experts say about 2,000 NotPetya attacks were launched in 2017, mainly aimed at Ukraine but the malicious software spread globally, causing billions of dollars of damage to computer systems across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Moscow denies being behind the attack, calling such claims “Russophobic”.

Donald Trump’s social-media platform, Truth Social, has launched, in a limited form, on the US Apple App Store.

The app had similarities to Twitter, commentators noted – Mr Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube last year.

And some early users had difficulties registering accounts.

Project lead and former congressman Devin Nunes said it was expected to be fully operational by the end of March.

Some of those trying to register had been told: “Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist,” the Reuters news agency reported.

Created by the year-old Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), Truth Social had previously been made available to about 500 beta testers.

Last week, Donald Trump Jr shared a screenshot of his father’s first “truth” on the social network: “Get ready. Your favourite president will see you soon.”

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Truth Social has already had one update for “bug fixes”, according to the App Store, and is now on version 1.0.1.

Last autumn, pranksters discovered a test version of the app website and, according to the Washington Post, adopted the username donaldjtrump.

Twitter banned the former president following the 6 January 2021 US Capitol riot, saying he had broken its rules on the glorification of violence.

And commentators have highlighted, among other things, Truth Social buttons that resemble those relating to Twitter’s reply, retweet and “like” functions.

Big tech
On its website, Truth Social describes itself as a “‘big tent’ social-media platform that encourages an open, free and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology”.

Mr Trump wants Truth Social to champion “free speech” and eschew the “censorship” of sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

It is a common view among conservatives Silicon Valley social-media companies are curtailing free speech by removing posts and users.

“We cannot use any of the big tech companies,” Mr Nunes, who resigned from Congress in December to become TMTG’s chief executive, told the conservative Newsmax network.

“So we’re having to build this from scratch.”

Frozen out
Mr Nunes has vowed Truth Social will be a “censorship-free experience”.

But any social-media platform on the App Store, and Google Play, has to remove content that breaks the rules.

And a truly uncensored platform would soon be frozen out.

At his zenith on Twitter, Mr Trump had more than 88 million followers.

But none of the other alternative platforms presenting themselves as censorship free, such as Gettr, Parler, Gab and Rumble, has attracted audiences comparable to those of the big social networks.

Companies such as Twitter “have had years to develop their platforms and build their audiences”, points out Darrell West, a senior technology innovation fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.

“I just think he’s going to discover it’s a lot harder than he realises,” he said.

“If this were easy, I think he would have done this six months ago.”

‘Very difficult’
Last year, Apple and Google removed Parler from their stores, for failing to take down posts they said threatened violence and contained illegal activity.

It was allowed back but only once it had agreed to Apple and Google’s terms of service.

“There simply is no way to avoid big tech,” Mr West says.

“Even if he has his own platform, if he’s violating their terms of service, they could basically push his app out of their app store, which would make it very difficult for him to build an audience.”

‘People worry’
Gettr, which also advocates “free speech” and looks like Twitter, was founded last year by Mr Trump’s former adviser and spokesman Jason Miller.

“It’s not like there’s the dummies’ guide to creating a social-media platform,” he told BBC News.

“You’ve got to find good talent.

“And quite frankly, there are a lot of people who are just scared… because people worry what it’s going to be like if I have something on my resume that challenges one of the big tech companies.”

Truth Social will also have to be robust enough to repel hackers.

“We have so many people who don’t want to see us be successful… even foreign governments and other bad actors,” Mr Nunes said.

Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, are voting again on whether to join a union.

It follows a ruling from the US National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), that Amazon had interfered with the previous election.

More than 6,000 workers are eligible to vote to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

Workers have until March 25 to vote, and results will be counted at the end of March.

Two other Amazon warehouses in Staten Island are also preparing to hold elections.

‘Objectionable behaviour’
The first election in Bessemer attracted worldwide attention, as it would have been Amazon’s first US union.

But workers at the BHM1 warehouse in Alabama rejected a move to unionise, by a margin of two to one.

As the new vote got under way, the RWDSU said: “Workers’ voices can and must be heard fairly, unencumbered by Amazon’s limitless power to control what must be a fair and free election.”

The NLRB ordered the new election in November.

Its report into how the election had been conducted found that Amazon had:

held meetings six days a week, 18 hours a day, intended to dissuade workers from joining a union
employed private paid consultants to attend these meetings
used text messages and written flyers on bathroom walls and television screens, to dissuade workers
installed a box for voting within view of multiple video surveillance cameras – which gave the impression that it was the official polling location – which Amazon controlled, and had knowledge of who participated
The RWDSU added: “We are deeply concerned that the decision fails to adequately prevent Amazon from continuing its objectionable behaviour in a new election.”

Algorithm decisions
In response Amazon said: “Our employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join the RWDSU last year. We look forward to our team in BHM1 having their voices heard again.”

Union membership in the US is low – just 6.3% of the private sector workforce, according to the US Department of Labour.

Amazon workers in Japan, the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Poland are unionised. Issues which the unions representing them look into include work-rate demands, injuries and the increasing use of algorithms in deciding how workers perform.