As Twitter heads toward its high value IPO, the attention is on its revenue and growth numbers. However, a big part of the story is the pervasiveness and influence of the messaging service. Compared with Facebook, with over a billion users, Twitter is a midsize town, with about a quarter of the audience.
On a day when President Obama told delegates at the United Nations that he welcomed the opportunity posed by diplomatic overtures from Iran’s new president, Israeli diplomats in Washington sounded a very different note online, mocking the moderate cleric as scarcely different from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
China's recent history has been marked by two key features: rampant economic growth and tight governmental control on the spread of information. Now, it seems, both are starting to wane, as economic expansion is slowing down and even the government's zealous grip on the internet is beginning to loosen.
For a sitting head of state, Toomas Hendrik Ilves spends an awful lot of time on the internet. Most world leaders leave their online presence to aides, punctuated only by the occasional initialized platitude. The president of Estonia, however, spends hours a day reading, writing, and tweeting to his nearly 17,000 followers about issues ranging from European Union border controls to the latest Thomas Pynchon novel.
The Prime Minister's official Twitter account has marked a highly offensive tweet as a "favourite" on the social networking site. The tweet, from a user mocking former Tory chairman Lord Tebbit, was posted in response to the Prime Minister's message of condolence for victims of the Nairobi terror attack.
Shortly after the massacre at the Westgate Mall in Kenya, the alleged terrorists, al-Shabab, began tweeting about their motivations from the now-suspended account @HSM_Press. A handful of accounts, most tweeting in Arabic, cheered on the terrorist unit still inside the mall. After tweeting a series of names of alleged gunmen still inside the Westgate Mall, a second account, @HSM_Press2, was quickly suspended by Twitter.
The Executive Director of U.N. Women says your tweets can help stop violence against women. “I would like all those men and boys…to stand up against violence against women,” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said during the 2013 Social Good Summit Sunday. She explained that men can make a difference by “tweeting about it, hosting conversations, fighting against those sites that abuse women.”
As of last week, posting a message that the Chinese government deems inaccurate on social media platforms can get you three years in the slammer, provided it gets 500 retweets (or their equivalent) or 5,000 views. At least, that’s what the law said. But would the new policy, part of the Chinese government’s draconian crackdown on “online rumors,” be enforced?