Twitter lets you 'turn off retweets' for accounts with bad taste

You can make your timeline a whole lot cleaner.  Twitter reminded users Monday that it solved the age-old problem of otherwise valuable accounts constantly retweeting trash into your timeline. That would be "turn off retweets," the setting which lets you see all of someone's tweets and none of their retweets.  "If you like an account's Tweets, but...

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Sex workers fear targeting under Instagram's terms of service

Normally when a social network updates its terms of service, barely anyone notices. But that's not the case with Instagram's newest Terms of Use, which have caused quite an uproar among sex workers online. The issue that's drawing notice is the platform's Community Guidelines. They require adherence to Facebook's Sexual Solicitation rules, which is...

Dec 2020

Half of U.S. adults don't know that Facebook does not do original news reporting

No, Facebook does not do its own original news reporting.  Social media is increasingly a primary source of news for U.S. adults. According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, however, almost half of U.S. adults don't realize that Facebook is merely disseminating news — not reporting it.  That's right, a large portion of the adults in the...

Dec 2020

Pass the wine and crank the tunes: Twitter tests 'dinner party'-like Spaces

Nothing pairs with your pinot and gruyère quite like a Twitter test feature. The social media company that brought you the fleet is back at it again with a new addition it hopes will, when done right, "feel like a well hosted dinner party." Say hello to Spaces, which Twitter describes as moderated audio conversations between users.  Twitter announced...

Dec 2020

Twitter tests 'humanization prompts' in effort to reduce toxic replies

Twitter wants you to remember that there are actual people on the other side of your replies.  The company began testing a new feature, dubbed humanization prompts, on Thursday with the goal of improving conversational health on the platform. As part of the test, some Twitter users will be presented with the shared interests and mutual followers of...

Dec 2020

Twitter explains how to apply for a verification badge

Your New Year's resolution to get verified on Twitter just got slightly more realistic. Three years after pausing the verification process, Twitter announced Thursday that it's making good on its November promise to start verifying accounts again. Or, rather, that it will make good on that promise. In a lengthy blog post, the company stated that starting...

Dec 2020

This was the year TV figured out technology. Finally.

If it weren't for technology, 2020 would truly have been the end of the world. We've had plagues before. We've had calls for social justice and government reform. We've had elections, overthrown tyrants. But we've never had it all at once, with a population of over seven billion and endless news and communication at our fingertips. TV and movies have...

Dec 2020

Twitter to 'automatically' de-verify users as it opens verifications back up

Twitter knows its verification process is a bit of a mess, and the company wants your help fixing it. Twitter officially "paused all general verifications" in November of 2017 after verifying a white supremacist. In a Tuesday blog post, the social media platform announced plans to start verifying accounts again early next year. But before that can...

Nov 2020

Thanks to a bug, Twitter Fleets didn't actually expire after 24 hours

On Nov. 17, Twitter ripped off the Stories feature that Snapchat popularized and Instagram popularized even further. Twitter's version is called Fleets and unfortunately, it didn't take long for people to find a way to subvert the 24-hour expiration timer. Twitter user donk_enby posted a thread that went viral over the weekend highlighting a bug in...

Nov 2020

Twitter Fleets have created a whole new opportunity for reply guys

Just days after Twitter premiered Fleets, its version of Stories, the company had to scale back on the roll-out to fix some bugs. But even in that short amount of time, one group in particular took advantage of the new feature: reply guys. While this isn't wholly surprising, as reply guys have become just another consequence of being a woman on the...

Nov 2020