Twitter has once again vowed to deal with its problematic users, and once again users are skeptical. The company's CEO Jack Dorsey recently tweeted about this topic, talking about the company's efforts to deal with the issue over the last couple of years. More revealing, though, is a leaked Twitter email which goes into more details about how the company will be enforcing its rules.
Google and Facebook have faced renewed criticism today, over their promotion of "fake news" in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting. In Google's case, the search giant was found to be including misleading pages from the controversial 4chan message board among its "Top stories" for results for incorrect speculation around the shooter's name on Monday morning. The company has blamed its algorithm for the mistake.
Following Facebook's own disclosure, Twitter says that it has identified more than 200 accounts on its service that are linked to Russia. Using the approximately 450 accounts that Facebook shared as part of its own review, Twitter says it found 201 corresponding accounts on its own service. It has also been transparent about advertisements purchased by the Russian publication Russia Today (RT).
Twitter set the cat among the pigeons (or whatever bird its logo actually is) yesterday, with news that it was testing out 280 character tweets. The double-length messages have met with mixed responses online, with some users embracing the fact that they have more characters, while others worry it's an end to the forced-brevity that helps make the service so appealing. However, not everybody got to play.
Rumors about such a change have been around for years, and now it has finally happened: Twitter has just doubled the character limit on tweets from 140 to 280. This change is aimed at reducing the need to 'cram' a thought into a tiny snippet of text, something argued as necessary for languages like English that require more characters to convey the same thoughts as other languages like Japanese.
US President Donald Trump's "Modern Day Presidential" use of social media has undoubtedly raised a few legal questions and tested the limits of such services' policies. Twitter, his favorite social network pulpit, has been thrown into the center of that hurricane. There have been calls for the social media giant to pull down some of Trump's tweets that they claim are in violation of Twitter's own policies. Without admitting that such tweets do violate its rules or not, Twitter defends its decision not to delete those tweets for the sake of newsworthiness, transparency, and, perhaps, evidence.
Facebook may have paved the way with the "lite" versions of its various apps, but now other social networks, including Twitter, are getting in on the trend of offering scaled-back apps for users in countries with slow data or unreliable connections. Twitter has revealed that it's begun testing a native Twitter Lite for Android, with an initial rollout in the Philippines.
FOX is embracing the change in viewer habits and will be piloting one of its new television shows on Twitter before it airs on television. Ghosted is a comedy series, and its pilot episode will air on Twitter's livestreaming platform before it airs on the TV network's channel. Anyone with access to Twitter will be able to watch it; there's no cable subscription requirement. FOX will also air a pre-show before Empire weekly over its next season.
Twitter has released its most recent transparency report, and in it we see that most of the allegedly abusive accounts reported to it for terms of service violations were allowed to stay live on the service. The reasons vary, according to Twitter, and include things like the company failing to find evidence of content that violated the company terms, as well as a failure on the reporter's part to identify which content was in violation of Twitter's TOS.
Following a test of the feature that had it appearing for only some users, Twitter has officially launched its Night Mode for everyone on its desktop website. The feature, which turns the screen dark for more comfortable night-time viewing, has already been available to mobile users for a while. When enabled, many bright elements are turned dark grey or black.
The Twitter app for Microsoft just received a much-needed update that brings a handful of features already accessible on other platforms. Chief among them is the addition of the Twitter timeline next to a streaming video, enabling users to scroll through tweets while watching a video. The update doesn't address all of the app's deficits, though, and some users are still unhappy.
If you enjoy the Night Mode option that Twitter introduced on its mobile apps last year, we've got good news: the company is now testing that same feature on its desktop website. Some Twitter users have access to the Night Mode feature right now, though it hasn't rolled out for everyone. A launch date for when Twitter plans to make the feature available across the board is unknown, but we do know where you can find the feature (if you have it).
