Tag: tweeting
A Sudanese Paramilitary Group Accused of Ethnic Cleansing Is Still Tweeting Through It
Twitter’s bookmark counter is a new way to convince yourself tweeting is worth your time
If you take pride in people bookmarking your social media posts, Twitter is ready to feed your ego. The social network has added a bookmark counter to its iOS app. Similar to the counts for likes, quotes and retweets, you’ll know just how many people saved a given tweet for later reference. The company hasn’t mentioned when the feature might come to Android or the web.
Twitter stresses that bookmarks are still private. Users may know if their tweets are popular, but they won’t know just who bookmarked a given post.
We love Bookmarks for saving Tweets to revisit later. Starting today on iOS, you’ll now see the total number of times a Tweet has been bookmarked on Tweet details.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 16, 2023
This counter isn’t just useful for bragging rights, of course. If you’re a creator or run a company’s Twitter account, the tally could show whether or not followers find your posts useful. That, in turn, may help you refine content to reach a wider audience.
The addition comes after a handful of upgrades to Twitter, such as alerts about community misinformation notes. However, the service has lately been dominated by concerns about a string of outages and a paywall for text-based two-factor authentication. However useful the bookmark counter may be, it’s not going to garner as much attention as it might have in the past.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitters-bookmark-counter-is-a-new-way-to-convince-yourself-tweeting-is-worth-your-time-210005962.html?src=rss
Grimsby Town apologise for tweeting Harvey Price video after FA Cup win
Elon Musk admits at trial that he ignored pleas to stop tweeting
Elon Musk will never stop posting, no matter who tells him to stop.
That was one of the takeaways from his brief testimony during his securities fraud trial, which took place in a San Francisco courthouse Friday. Lawyers for the plaintiffs peppered Musk with questions about his tweets as they work up to his infamous “funding secured” tweet from 2018 at the center of this case. Musk is being sued by a class of Tesla investors who claim his bumbling attempts to take Tesla private that year cost them millions of dollars.
Musk wasn’t asked about that tweet yet, though. He took the stand for a little over 30 minutes before the trial recessed until next Monday. But the plaintiff’s lawyers got in plenty of questions about his Twitter habits,…
There’s never been a better time to stop tweeting
There’s never really been a shortage of reasons to spend less time on Twitter. Even before Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover, the platform was long plagued by misinformation, hate speech, harassment and other ills that made it less than welcoming.
There’s never been a better time to quit Twitter. The Elon Musk-induced chaos at the company has breathed new life into a crop of alternative platforms, and has inspired a new wave of competing efforts to win over disillusioned Twitter users.
Competition emerges
Of all the alternatives out there, none have benefited as much as Mastodon. The open-source service was created in 2016, and first gained notoriety in 2017, when some Twitter users were upset with changes the company had made to the functionality of @-replies. At that time though, it didn’t gain much traction outside a small base of hardcore enthusiasts.
That all changed from the second Musk announced he wanted to buy Twitter. Mastodon saw an immediate spike back in April and the momentum has only increased, according to the nonprofit. “Mastodon has recently exploded in popularity, jumping from approx. 300K monthly active users to 2.5M between the months of October and November, with more and more journalists, political figures, writers, actors and organizations moving over,” founder Eugen Rochko wrote in a recent blog post.
The service isn’t a perfect analog to Twitter. Its platform, which runs on thousands of servers, can make signing up a bit confusing. And a couple of the platform’s most popular servers, like mastodon.social, have at times halted new sign-ups due to surging demand.
But, as Rochko points out, the decentralized platform has become one of the top platforms of choice for some of Twitter’s most influential — and most followed — users. Tellingly, when Musk briefly imposed a ban on accounts promoting alternative social networks, Mastodon’s official Twitter account was the only social app to be suspended.
Mastodon is far from the only previously-niche app to get a boost from turmoil at Twitter. Other apps like CounterSocial, which has a Tweetdeck-like interface, and Tribel, which describes itself as a “pro-democracy Twitter alternative” have also seen an uptick in sign-ups.
There’s also a wave of competition from fresh upstarts. Post News, a new service from former Waze CEO Noam Bardin has also tried to capitalize on Twitter’s dysfunction. The service, which is currently invitation-only, rushed to launch an early version of its beta in November in hopes of drawing away disillusioned Twitter users. Post, which bills itself as a place “to discover, read, watch, discuss and share premium news content without subscriptions or ads,” has more than 610,000 people on its waitlist, according to Bardin.
Another app that’s emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, is Hive Social, an image-centric platform with a feed that looks more like Instagram than Twitter. The service was founded in 2019, and hit 1.5 million users in November, according to the company. The site has had some notable security issues, which it claims to have fixed, but has still managed to make an impression with Gen Z Twitter users.
Legacy platforms are also trying to seize the opportunity created by growing apathy for Twitter. Tumblr claimed to see a surge in new and returning users, according to Matt Mullenweg, CEO of parent company Automattic. The site has also made a habit of trolling Musk and his new policies for Twitter, including with the addition of a $7.99 “Important Blue Internet Checkmark” for users’ blogs. Mullenweg has also said Tumblr will adopt ActivityPub, the protocol powering Mastodon, to make the two services interoperable.
Meta is also keen to challenge its longtime rival. The company recently launched a new “Notes” feature within Instagram that allows users to share status updates at the top of their inbox. At 60 characters, it’s hardly a full-fledged Twitter alternative, but it might not be the last such feature we see from Meta. The New York Timesreports that the company has discussed several ideas to go after Twitter’s “bread and butter.”
The future for Twitter Quitters
It’s hardly the first time that unpopular decisions within Twitter have sparked an interest in alternatives. But in the past, surges to outside platforms have been relatively short lived. And most would-be competitors are still only a fraction of the size of Twitter.
Even with an influx of new users, Mastodon, Post News, Hive Social and Tumblr are still substantially smaller than Twitter. And, as unpopular and autocratic and Musk’s policy decisions seem, the idea of starting over on a new platform can feel daunting. Not everyone can easily rebuild their social graphs on alternative sites, and some may find the growing crop of Twitter clones to also be unwelcoming (this is especially true if you rely on accessibility features, as many of the newer platforms haven’t invested much in these features.)
Still, this particular moment feels different than other times when Twitter has struggled to keep disgruntled users around. For one, there are more choices than ever before for those looking for a reason to leave. But it’s also unique because there are more people actually active on these alternatives than ever before.
Thousands of People Are Tweeting the Exact Same Joke About Elon’s Twitter Fiasco
Digital activism started with KONY 2012, which asked people to highlight the crimes of an African warlord in an attempt to aid a global manhunt to catch him. The ALS ice bucket challenge aimed to raise awareness of the horrors of a degenerative disease.
Android Promoters Won’t Get Caught Tweeting From iPhone Anymore With Upcoming Twitter Changes
Musk said in a tweet this morning that Twitter will be eliminating the line that says “Twitter for iPhone” or “Twitter for Android,” as this is a “waste of screen space.” He said that “no one even knows” why the feature was introduced in the first place.
Device details have been used several times to catch employees promoting Android-based smartphones from their iPhones. In 2019, for example, a Huawei employee wished Huawei followers a happy new year, but used an iPhone to do so. A screenshot of the tweet went viral, and the employees involved were demoted for causing “damage to the Huawei brand.”
Samsung employees have tweeted Samsung promotions from iPhones multiple times over the years, and celebrities have also gotten into trouble. Actress Gal Gadot, for example, sang the praises of her new Huawei Mate 10 Pro while tweeting from an iPhone.
It is not clear when the device labels will be removed, but as of right now, the feature is still in place. Musk also said that he has instructed Twitter employees to turn off unspecified “microservices” bloatware, as “less than 20% are needed for Twitter to work.”
And we will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space & compute) below every tweet. Literally no one even knows why we did that …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2022
Musk last week implemented his new $8 Twitter Blue subscription service, which provides a verification badge that was previously limited to verified individuals. It resulted in immediate chaos with a number of people paying $8 to impersonate companies and celebrity accounts. Insulin maker Eli Lilly, for example, saw its stock fall more than 4 percent after a verified account impersonated the company and announced that insulin was free. Another person impersonated LeBron James and announced he was requesting a trade, while yet another account impersonated Nintendo and tweeted an image of Mario making a rude gesture.
Twitter ended up pausing the Twitter Blue verification temporarily, and people are not able to purchase Twitter Blue subscriptions at this time. Twitter has been considering another “Official” verification badge, and it is not yet known how the company will solve the problem.
This article, “Android Promoters Won’t Get Caught Tweeting From iPhone Anymore With Upcoming Twitter Changes” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Look what you made them do: People can’t stop tweeting about Taylor Swift, Twitter confirms
There’s no “Question…?” that Swifties run Twitter.
Ahead of the release of Taylor Swift’s tenth studio album Midnights, Twitter revealed just how much mayhem the pop star has caused on the platform in their “Swift Report.” Long story short, it’s a lot.
According to the platform, in the first three days after Swift’s Midnights announcement users tweeted 1.6 million times about it. Twitter reports that 🚨 and 😭 were the most popular emojis used by fans to express the whirlwind of emotions that can only be caused by a Swift album announcement.
Twitter also revealed the most-anticipated tracks on the forthcoming album. Since Swift shared the full Midnights track list, the tracks fans can’t stop tweeting about are “Snow on the Beach (ft. Lana Del Rey),” “Lavender Haze,” and “Karma.” On the day that Swift announced Del Rey’s feature, mentions of the “Summertime Sadness” singer skyrocketed, growing nine times compared to the day before.
Swift’s hold on Twitter is nothing new. Over the past 12 years, there have been 329 million tweets mentioning her, and 19 million tweets containing “Swiftie” or “Swifties.”
As we remember all too well, when Red (Taylor’s Version) was released there were more tweets about it than basketball and football combined — and when the clock strikes midnight tonight we shall see Swift’s impact on the timeline rise again.