by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, World
San Francisco : Taking US President Donald Trump’s side once again, Twitter has retracted its previous explanation for why it did not remove Trump’s tweets that included graphic anti-Muslim videos.
Trump this week retweeted videos by far-right British politician Jayda Fraser that purported to show Muslims performing violent acts.
Reacting to this, British Prime Minister Theresa May called Trump “wrong” for promoting such “hateful narratives”.
Trump replied back, telling May that she should instead turn her attention to terrorism and that “we are doing just fine”.
Later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: “We mistakenly pointed to the wrong reason (why) we didn’t take action on the videos from earlier this week. We’re still looking critically at all of our current policies, and appreciate all the feedback.”
Now, a two-part tweet from the trust and safety team at the micro-blogging platform has said that the videos “are permitted on Twitter based on our current media policy”.
“Earlier this week Tweets were sent that contained graphic and violent videos. We pointed people to our Help Centre to explain why they remained up, and this caused some confusion,” @TwitterSafety tweeted late on Friday.
“To clarify: these videos are not being kept up because they are newsworthy or for public interest. Rather, these videos are permitted on Twitter based on our current media policy,” it added.
In September, the micro-blogging platform did not remove Trump’s controversial tweet on North Korea that clearly violated its guidelines.
Trump tweeted: “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at UN. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”
People wondered why Twitter did not remove the tweet that violated the company’s rules.
Reacting to this, Biz Stone, Co-founder of Twitter, posted: “Some of you have been asking why we haven’t taken down the Tweet mentioned here. Among the considerations is its ‘newsworthiness’ and whether a Tweet is of public interest.”
Twitter has never acknowledged publicly that Trump has violated any of its guidelines.
Dorsey has also defended Trump’s tweets.
Earlier this month, a Twitter employee brought down Trump’s Twitter account for 11 minutes on his last day in office.
Twitterati praised the Twitter employee who deactivated Trump’s account.
There have been ongoing calls for Twitter to ban Trump over tweets that critics said could be interpreted as “calls to violence”.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Markets, Social Media, Technology, World
Ajit Pai
San Francisco : Following a letter in which Twitter along with others had asked US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reconsider its plan to end net neutrality, the agency’s Indian-origin Chairman Ajit Pai has dubbed the micro-blogging site as a “part of the problem”.
During an event hosted by the “free market think tank” R Street Institute and the “liberty”-focused Lincoln Network, Pai threw Twitter and other online services under the bus to show that it is not just broadband providers that can exert control over Internet content, Tech Crunch reported late on Tuesday.
“When it comes to an open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem. The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate,” he was quoted as saying.
“Twitter blocked Representative Marsha Blackburn from advertising her Senate campaign launch video because it featured a pro-life message. Before that, during the so-called Day of Action, Twitter warned users that a link to a statement by one company on the topic of Internet regulation ‘may be unsafe’,” he added.
“And to say the least, the company appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users. This conduct is many things, but it isn’t fighting for an open Internet,” he noted.
On Monday, over 200 businesses asked FCC to reconsider its plan to end net neutrality after the agency announced voting to rollback rules adopted in 2015 that require internet service providers to treat all online traffic equally.
As per current net neutrality rules, all businesses are allowed to compete equally. But without those rules, online businesses may be stymied by internet providers that prioritise their own interests, the companies said.
The FCC will vote on the proposal, known as Restoring Internet Freedom Order, at its December 14 open meeting.
Pai highlighted two downsides to the present rules — decrease in investment and stifle innovation.
Pai last week had said that the so-called net neutrality rules “imposed heavy-handed, utility-style regulations” upon the internet that have “depressed investment in building and expanding broadband networks”.
On content, he said that recent experience shows that so-called edge providers are deciding what content consumers see. These providers routinely block or discriminate against content they do not like.
“In this way, edge providers are a much bigger actual threat to an open Internet than broadband providers, especially when it comes to discrimination on the basis of viewpoint… So let’ss be clear,” he said.
“They might cloak their advocacy in the public interest, but the real interest of these Internet giants is in using the regulatory process to cement their dominance in the Internet economy,” he added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Micro-blogging site Twitter has admitted that specific locations included with some of its users’ tweets were revealed without their permission last week due to a “bug”.
“We’ve discovered an issue for a small percentage of people who recently had location-sharing on, Tweeted from https://twitter.com, and tapped to add an emoji or GIF. In certain instances, a city-level location was also included in the Tweet,” the social media giant posted late on Friday.
Twitter users have reportedly tweeted about the privacy issue last week, directed at accounts associated with Twitter and its founders.
Some users claimed the location added to their tweets was not their actual location but instead a place they had recently visited or searched for on the micro-blogging site.
The company has said it has removed the locations from tweets that were affected by the bug and has also reached out to such accounts users via email (if it’s provided to them), according to Inverse.com.
This comes barely two days after Google confirmed the practice of gathering location data through Android smartphones even when the location services were turned off and there was no SIM card in the device.
The search engine giant has now been summoned by regulators in South Korea this week for questioning.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : After running a successful trial with few users, Twitter has finally rolled out its new 280-character limit virtually for all users.
In September, Twitter launched a test that expanded the 140-character limit so that users could express themselves easily in a tweet.
“Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter.
“Looking at all the data, we’re excited to share we’ve achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue,” the micro-blogging platform said in a blog post on Wednesday.
During the first few days of the test, many people tweeted the full 280-limit because it was new and novel but soon after, the behaviour normalised.
“We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained,” said Aliza Rosen, Product Manager, Twitter.
Only five per cent of tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only two per cent were over 190 characters.
In addition to more tweeting, people who had more room to tweet received more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions), got more followers and spent more time on Twitter during the experiment.
“Japanese, Korean and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages. In fact, these languages have always been able to say more with their tweets because of the density of their writing systems,” the post said.
The average length of a tweet in Japanese is 15 characters, and only 0.4 per cent of tweets hit the 140-character limit.
But in English, a much higher percentage of tweets have 140 characters (nine per cent).
Most Japanese tweets are 15 characters while most English tweets are 34.
According to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, this is a small change, but a big move for them.
“The 140 limit was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!” Dorsey had tweeted during the time of trial.
The 140-character limit has been around since 2006 and has become part of the product’s personality.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Investing, Marketing Basics, Markets, Media, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, World
Paradise Papers
Washington : As the US Congress investigates Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election by using social media giants, a new trove of confidential documents has revealed that Facebook and Twitter received major investments from firms with ties to Kremlin-owned corporations.
The documents called “Paradise Papers”, were obtained by German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and several media outlets across the globe.
According to the ICIJ, the records show that one of the Kremlin-owned firms, VTB Bank, quietly directed $191 million into an investment fund, DST Global, which is owned by billionaire Yuri Milner, that used the money to buy a large stake in Twitter in 2011.
“They also show that a subsidiary of the Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom heavily funded an offshore company that partnered with DST Global in a large investment in Facebook,” the ICIJ said in a statement on Monday.
Milner and other partners in the deals reaped large gains when they sold their stakes shortly after Facebook’s initial public offering in 2012 and Twitter’s in 2013.
The disclosure shows that years before Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential election, the Kremlin had a financial interest in the US social media.
Facebook and Twitter, however, said they had properly reviewed Milner’s investments.
In response to questions from the ICIJ and its partners, Milner said the investments his firm makes, including the Twitter and Facebook deals, have always been based on business merits and have nothing to do with politics.
VTB also confirmed that it had invested in Twitter through Milner’s firm DST Global.
The documents also revealed that Apple was seeking out a new tax shelter around Europe and the Caribbean, ReCode reported.
In an email obtained by the ICIJ, an Apple lawyer inquired about whether moving to one of the six tax havens would allow its Irish subsidiary to “conduct management activities … without being subject to taxation in these jurisdictions”.
In August, Apple had come under fire for striking a deal with the Irish government that allowed it to avoid paying virtually any taxes in many of its global markets.
The European Commission ordered Apple to pay $13 billion in back taxes.
—IANS
