In today’s latest roundup of technology news:

  • Twitter suspends several alt-right accounts
  • Facebook apologizes for latest metrics errors
  • Google updates translation tech
  • San Francisco votes to cap short-term rentals

The details:

  • Twitter suspends several alt-right accounts

Twitter has suspended the accounts of several prominent members of the so-called “alt-right” in an apparent purge.

Twitter declined comment, but noted that its policies forbid violent threats, hate speech or harassment, adding that it will take action against repeat offenders.

Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank, says his personal Twitter account, as well as the accounts for the institute and his magazine, were all suspended this week without notification.

The Twitter accounts of alt-right personalities Paul Town, Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers also were suspended.

Spencer, who is credited with popularizing the term “alt-right,” says he didn’t tweet anything recently that might provoke a suspension. He calls the suspensions a coordinated attack against users with certain viewpoints.

  • Facebook apologizes for latest metrics errors

Facebook says it will work with independent companies like Nielsen and comScore to review more of its metrics after it uncovered new problems with the data it provides to advertisers and publishers that use its network.

Facebook had apologized to advertisers in September for errors that led to overstating how long users watched videos.

On Wednesday, the Menlo Park, California, company said in a post that it miscalculated four metrics, including undercounting how many people watched all of a video and overcounting how much time people spent reading “Instant Articles,” which loads stories from publishers like The New York Times and Washington Post more quickly on Facebook.

Facebook and Google together account for the majority of digital ad dollars spent in the U.S.

  • Google updates translation tech

Google is promising that its widely used translation service is now even more fluent, thanks to an advance that’s enabling its computers to interpret complete sentences.

That may sound simple, but it took years of engineering to pull off. Until now, Google’s technology analyzed phrases in pieces and then cobbled together a sometimes stilted translation.

Now that Google’s machines can interpret entire sentences, the translations of extended passages of text should read and sound much more like a native speaker of the language. The technology, dubbed “neural machine translation,” is similar to what Google has been using for the past few years to identify people and objects in pictures stored in its Photos service.

Google described its neural machine tool as the biggest leap for its translation service in a decade.

Forrester Research analyst Mike Gualtieri also believes Google’s new method is a significant breakthrough, although he said he expects it to make some potentially embarrassing mistakes in its early stages, much like the Photos service misidentified some things when it first rolled out.

“I doubt it will be translating like the computers on ‘Star Trek’ quite yet,” Gualtieri said.

Starting Tuesday, the technology is being be used to translate phrases to and from English and eight other languages — French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish.

  • San Francisco votes to cap short-term rentals

San Francisco has approved a measure to cap Airbnb and other short-term rentals at 60 days a year.

Tuesday’s vote by the Board of Supervisors was an initial one. The proposed ordinance, which would apply to hosts who register their homes with the city on or after Tuesday, requires a second vote.

The ordinance would not affect the roughly 1,700 hosts who have already registered. Those hosts may continue to rent out entire homes for up to 90 days a year, and they can share their homes as much as they want if they stay on site.
There are thousands more hosts who have not registered and are not regulated.

Foes of San Francisco-based Airbnb say the online platform encourages landlords to take units off the market.
Hosts say they need the extra income to survive.