Amidst vague and uninformed questions during today’s House Judiciary hearing with Facebook, Google, and Twitter on social media filtering practices, Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) dropped a bombshell. “What about converting the large behemoth organizations that we’re talking about here into public utilities?” King’s suggestion followed his inquiries about right-wing outlet Gateway Pundit losing reach on […]
Twitter is ready to squeeze a lot more money out of its trending topics. After minimizing its mediocre Moments feature and burying it inside the renamed Explore tab, Twitter is now starting to test Promoted Trend Spotlight ads. These put a big visual banner equipped with a GIF or image background atop Explore for the […]
After a Washington Post report last week that Twitter’s fake account purge might affect its second-quarter user numbers, Twitter’s chief financial officer said on Monday that most accounts affected by its clean-up will not be included in its metrics. In a tweet, Ned Segal explained that most of the suspended accounts were less than 30 […]
Bots, your days of tweeting politically divisive nonsense might be numbered. The Washington Post reported Friday that in the last few months Twitter has aggressively suspended accounts in an effort to stem the spread of disinformation running rampant on its platform. The Washington Post reports that Twitter suspended as many as 70 million accounts between […]
Twitter today announced it was acquiring the “trust and safety as a service” startup Smyte to help it better address issues related to online abuse, harassment, spam, and security on its platform. But it also decided to immediately shut down access to Smyte’s API without warning, leaving Smyte’s existing customers no time to transition to a new […]
Twitter has a new product manager in the wake of a large re-org of the company announced this week. The changes will see Twitter dividing its business into groups including engineering, product, revenue product, design and research, and more, while also bringing on Kayvon Beykpour, the GM of video and former Periscope CEO, as product […]
Twitter is unveiling the Ads Transparency Center that it announced back in October. This comes as Twitter and other online platforms have faced growing political scrutiny around the role they may have played in spreading misinformation, particularly in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For example, House Democrats recently released thousands of Russian-funded political Facebook ads, […]
Twitter’s history of being a bit unfriendly to developers building third-party clients hasn’t frightened off Will Bishop. The young Australian developer recently released a version of Twitter for Apple Watch called Chirp, in order to fill the void created by Twitter pulling its official app last fall. (Let’s see how long it will last, shall […]
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s (so far) five-year project to expand access to the Internet in emerging markets makes plenty of business sense when you look at the latest report by the Pew Research Center — which shows social media use has plateaued across developed markets but continues to rise in the developing world. In 2015-16, roughly four-in-ten adults […]
Twitter this morning announced it has agreed to buy San Francisco-based technology company Smyte, which describes itself as “trust and safety as a service.” Founded in 2014 by former Google and Instagram engineers, Smyte offers tools to stop online abuse, harassment, and spam, and protect user accounts. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but this […]