Want to get verified on Twitter? Jack Dorsey wants that for you too
For a large number of Twitter users, there is one question that crops up time and time again -- "How do I get verified on Twitter?". Once dominated by celebrities and politicians, Twitter eventually allowed anyone to ask for a coveted tick -- but then closed down open applications after problems with white supremacists.
A lot of users were stripped of their verified status, but gaining the tick still remains a goal for many. Now Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has some good news. The plan is to open up verification to everyone -- and Twitter will not be acting as judge and jury.
Twitter introduces Bookmarks and new sharing options
Several years in the making, Twitter has finally gained a Bookmarks option. While it has long been possible to like/heart a tweet to make it easier to access in the future, this method essentially advertised your activity to everyone -- and it might well be that you didn't "like" the tweet in question anyway. Privacy FTW!
On top of this, Twitter has also introduced sharing options which can be accessed through a new icon.
Twitter kills its Mac app, and that's a good thing
In 2016, I bought my very first Mac -- a beautiful MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Since then, the laptop and I have been inseparable. The computer comes with me when I go to, say, a coffee shop, but it also serves as my desktop when I am home by connecting to a large monitor, keyboard, and mouse. In other words, I love the computer, but also, I really admire macOS.
When I first began using the Mac, I downloaded a bunch of software I thought I would enjoy. As a big Twitter user, I obviously installed the official app for that social network. You know what? It sucked. I tried to make it work, but ultimately, using a web browser was just a much better experience. On any desktop operating system, users are wise to use a browser. Let's be honest -- Twitter apps are best saved for smartphones and tablets. Twitter the company apparently agrees, as today, it officially kills the Mac app.
Trump was almost ten times more popular with Russian Twitter bots than Clinton
In the run-up to the 2016 US election, Russian bots shared Donald Trump's tweets 470,000 times -- nearly ten times those of Hillary Clinton.
The figures come courtesy of Twitter, who shared the data with Congress for a review into Russian influence on the election. In the period September 1 to November 15, 2016, Russian bots accounted for more than four percent of Trump's retweets.
Twitter admits that 670,000 people interacted with Russian propaganda bots during US election
Twitter has revealed that a total of 677,775 Americans followed accounts or liked tweets associated with Russian propaganda groups during the 2016 US election. The company does not reveal how many people saw the tweets posted by these accounts.
That Russia tried to use Twitter -- and other social networks -- to influence the outcome of the US election is hardly news, but there has been an ongoing investigation trying to determine the scale of the operation. In its latest announcement, Twitter also says that it closed 50,258 accounts with links to Russia.
Twitter denies reading your direct messages
Undercover footage emerged this week in which Twitter engineers said that hundreds of company employees were reading users' direct messages. The footage was shared by Project Veritas, and now Twitter has come out on the defensive.
The conservative activist group's video purports to show Twitter employees saying that the company not only has access to, but also actively reads, users' DMs. Project Veritas is on a mission to highlight what it believes to be liberal bias in the media, and this is not the first undercover footage it has recorded relating to Twitter. Other footage shows an engineer saying the company could hand President Trump's deleted tweets and direct messages to the Department of Justice.
7 things you could do instead of CES
The annual scourge is upon us, as tens of thousands of attention seekers descend on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. Nowhere else can you watch bloggers and journalists in a constant chase of their public relations foibles, who desperately hunt for all the attention they can get their clients. Think a thousand kids in a small room, calling for mommy and groping her dress. Then multiply ten times.
My last CES pilgrimage was 2008. That's right, I haven't gone in 10 years. No-o-o-o regrets. Nothing important ever comes out of the show, even though each year the hype suggests otherwise. Most new unveiled products won't ship until second half of the year. If ever. There's more vaporware at CES than hot air—and that's no easy feat. Surely the Las Vegas Convention Center installs extra carbon dioxide scrubbers so that participants don't asphyxiate. If there was an alarm for toxic babble, it would sound incessantly.
Twitter won't ban Donald Trump because he's special
Since Donald Trump's inauguration, there have been countless calls for him to be banned from Twitter. As well as concerns that his often rash and bombastic statements could cause diplomatic nightmares nationally and internationally, there have also been suggestions that his particularly aggressive tone and threats violate Twitter's policies.
But Twitter has consistently refused to either ban the US president or remove his more controversial tweets -- despite doing the same with other users. Now the company has taken steps to explain why this is. In essence, it's because Trump -- and other world leaders -- have been granted a special status.
Donald Trump wants US Postal Service to charge Amazon 'much more'
In an attack on Amazon, President Trump has called upon the US Postal Service to charge the retail giant "much more" to ship packages to customers.
This is not the first time Trump has hit out at Amazon and Jeff Bezos, but his latest vocal volley was not well-received by his followers on Twitter.
John McAfee and the strange Twitter hack
In a cautionary tale for the festive season, unorthodox security guru John McAfee claims to have had his Twitter account hacked.
The account sent out a number of 'coin of the day' Tweets on December 27th encouraging followers to buy some lesser known crypto currencies. Nothing especially strange in that as McAfee has himself sent this type of message in the past.
Twitter kills anti-Nazi bot Imposter Buster that tried to expose racists
A Twitter account designed to alert users about racist accounts has been shut down by Twitter. Imposter Buster was a bot created by journalist Yair Rosenberg in an attempt to expose racism on the platform.
But while many people welcomed the activities of Imposter Buster -- which would automatically join in the conversations of high-profile racist users in an attempt to expose their trolling of ethnic minority users -- Twitter saw things differently and slapped the bot with a permanent ban.
Twitter Insiders is dead
Today, the Twitter Insiders program dies. Wait, you didn't know such a thing existed? You aren't alone. It certainly wasn't a household name, and interest in it was apparently quite low. As a result, Twitter is temporarily ending the program as of December 22, 2017.
If you aren't familiar, Twitter Insiders was a survey program that was announced in June of 2016. Data analysts from a company called "C Space" would solicit feedback from Twitter users that signed up. The program would not only ask for feedback about Twitter, but other brands and topics too. While some of the survey feedback was given for free, Twitter would sometimes pay users for participating too -- a dollar here, five dollars there -- nothing significant. And now it is dead.
Twitter introduces new 'threads' feature for easier tweetstorms
It's just over a month since Twitter doubled the maximum possible length of tweets to 280 characters -- but this was not enough for many people. However, rather than further increasing the length of tweets, the site has instead introduced another feature users have been begging for -- threading.
The threading of tweets -- linking together multiple related tweets so people can follow a longer piece of writing -- has been tried by users in a couple of ways (numbering tweets or self-replying, for example) for some time now. But the new feature is the first time there has been official support, and the implementation should go down well with users.
Twitter is working on a 'save for later' feature called, uninspiringly, Bookmarks
Twitter is one of the more divisive social media platforms out there, managing to attract passionate love and hate in just about equal measure. But even people who use and like Twitter freely admit that it has its problem, one of which is the lack of a bookmarking feature.
There is the option to "like" tweets, but this can be an awkward way to save something you're interested in reading later. Recognizing that users need something rather more robust and useful, Twitter is working on a feature called Bookmarks.
Twitter outlines new verification policies and strips many right-wingers of their blue tick
After awarding the coveted blue tick of verification to a white supremacist, Twitter recently announced that it would be pausing its verification program. Making good on this promise, Twitter says that it is not only no longer accepting public requests for accounts to be verified, it is also introducing new guidelines, and removing the verification tick from accounts that do not make the grade.
This means that white nationalist Richard Spencer, far-righter Laura Loomer, English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson and others no longer have a blue tick next to their names. While Twitter is promoting this clamp down as part of its war on hate speech, some are complaining that the company is trying to silence right-wing voices.
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