This week the folks at Cinemark Theaters released a video to their Twitter account showing their sanitization process. The video is brief - just 18 seconds long. In the video we see a man by the name of "Marc" in a theater in West Planto, Texas. Marc's job is "sanitizing [Cinemark's] auditorium seats before each movie." The entire situation is strange, to be sure.
Twitter has announced a new feature that gives users the option of sharing short audio clips in addition to text, videos, GIFs, and images. The company says this new option 'will add a more human touch' to its platform, enabling users to hear someone speak their thoughts with all of the included emotion rather than just reading plain text on a screen. Voice clips are now being tested on the platform.
Some social media users have developed the bad habit of reading an article's title and then either commenting on it or sharing it without actually reading its content first. Twitter is addressing this problem with a new test that encourages some of its users to read the article before sharing it with their followers, paving the way for more accurate and meaningful discussions.
Twitter is going to bring back its verification requests feature, at least according to a new leak. This tool enables users to directly request that Twitter verify their accounts, giving them the coveted blue checkmark on their profile. The feature was removed in 2017 after the social media company verified a white supremacist, but it may return alongside new policies that'll prevent a second mistake.
In the time between the announcement of the Cyberpunk 2077 livestream event and now, a few things have happened. Now the event, called Night City Wire, will take place June 25th instead of June 11, as originally planned. Quite a few other events were postponed early this week as a result of worldwide protests of police brutality and the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Department officer (now former officer) Derek Chauvin.
A set of social movements were given a name this week starting with an initiative called The Show Must Be Paused. The music industry was implored to take action starting on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. Per the announcement of #TheShowMustBePaused, this protest began in force in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black citizens at the hands of police.
The Trump administration have released an executive order to hold Twitter and social media platforms responsible for posts found on their sites. The executive order gives more power to federal regulators to argue that social media companies are violating free speech rights when they censor posts or limit user privileges.
Twitter will allow uses to limit replies to their tweets, in the company's latest - and seemingly flawed - attempt to limit harassment on the social network. The new setting, which is rolling out to select users from today, will add reply settings when users tweet, which can at their most strict cut down on all replies completely.
For better or worse, social media has quickly risen up to be an alternate or even major source of information for many people. Unfortunately, these networks have not been able to quickly adapt to their newfound power, much less the responsibility they now bear as channels of news, information, and, sometimes, disinformation. Twitter, in particular, has been slowly changing to the times to give users more control over their tweets and the discussions that form around them. Its latest new trick, to let users see retweets with comments in a single place.
Twitter has announced that it will start cracking down on COVID-19 misinformation, limiting the spread of this misleading or otherwise 'disputed' content on its platform. The company initially published a blog post in March detailing its efforts related to the pandemic, stating that it was working with 'trusted partners' to deal with coronavirus content that goes against trusted sources.
Twitter was initially envisioned as a simple way for people to broadcast short bursts of information or sentiments, using text messages even, with very little back and forth between followers. That was only true for the beginning and Twitter exploded into a social network giant that often involved "tweetstorms" and almost epic-length threads of discussion. Of course, that's great for Twitter so instead of curbing that habit, it is testing new features that could at least make users' lives a bit easier.
It may seem almost unimaginable but one of the world's largest social networks was actually built upon SMS, that service we often refer to as old-school text messaging. That explains, for example, why tweets were limited to 140 characters up until recently. Twitter shed off the latter limitation last year and is now dropping the last traces of its true origin. But in dropping SMS support, it also reportedly dropped millions of accounts, most of them inactive, that relied on the technology.