Articles about Twitter

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has admitted that the company's verification system is "broken" after a blue tick was awarded to white supremacist Jason Kessler. There was a backlash this week after Kessler -- who helped to arrange the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville earlier in the year -- had his Twitter account verified.

Responding to the negative reaction this prompted, Twitter announced that its verification program has been paused. The company also said that the verification tick had been largely misinterpreted by people.

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Signing up for any service means facing the username battle. There are two obstacles: is your username still available, and does it meet the necessary requirements. With Twitter, getting an @YourName handle is tricky because there are simply so many users (and bots), but there has long been a highly restrictive limit on the length of names -- just 15 characters.

Twitter has long offered something of a compromise in allowing display names that are slightly longer -- but only up to 20 characters. Now, the company has announced that there are more than twice as many characters to play with. Display names can now be up to 50 characters in length -- usernames, unfortunately, remain unchanged.

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After a few weeks of testing with a limited number of users, Twitter is rolling out 280-character tweets to (nearly) everyone -- but says that very few of the testers reached this limit.

With the 140-character limit, says Twitter, just 9 percent of tweets hit the upper limit; with 280 characters to play with, this drops to 1 percent. The increase has divided opinion on Twitter, but the company's decision to replace the simple character countdown -- to warn how much more you could type -- with a bizarre circular icon has been given a rather negative reception.

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Over the weekend, users noticed that a number of search terms -- such as bisexual -- appeared to be blocked on Twitter. Having said "we've identified an error with search results for certain terms. We apologize for this. We’re working quickly to resolve & will update soon," Twitter has finally explained what happened.

Perhaps predictably there's -- assuming you believe Twitter -- nothing sinister going on. Instead, the company's latest policy changes, which took extra measures to block sexual content, meant that its automated systems were being rather heavy-handed in censoring certain content, completely failing to take context into consideration.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has told a court that Donald Trump's blocking of users who criticize him on Twitter is a violation of their First Amendment rights. The digital rights group says that people have a "constitutional right to receive government messages transmitted through social media and participate in the forums created by them."

The EFF argues that Trump's use of Twitter has become a hallmark of his presidency, and by blocking individuals he is denying them access to the policy details and other information he frequently disseminates through tweets.

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