Category Archives: Twitter

Twitter and Google join Facebook in tightening rules on US election claims

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Platforms will target unverified claims of election rigging and premature results declarations

Premature claims of victory will be blocked from Twitter and Google in the run-up to November’s US presidential election, as both companies follow Facebook in trying to fight the prospect of a stolen vote.

Under its new rules, Twitter will treat as harmful misinformation any tweet which makes false claims about election rigging, or prematurely claims to announce the election results.

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Twitter hack: US and UK teens arrested over breach of celebrity accounts

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Three men charged in hack that saw accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk compromised in bitcoin scam

Authorities have charged three men in a major Twitter breach this month that hacked the accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls to scam people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in bitcoin.

The suspects include a 19-year-old British man from Bognor Regis, a 22-year-old man from Orlando, Florida, and a teenager from Tampa, Florida.

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Chief rabbi accuses Facebook and Twitter of complicity in antisemitism

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Ephraim Mirvis joins 48-hour boycott after grime musician Wiley’s antisemitic tirade

The UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has accused Facebook and Twitter of complicity in antisemitism through inaction as he urged both platforms to do more to tackle hate speech after an antisemitic tirade last week from the grime musician Wiley.

In a letter to the technology companies’ chief executives, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mirvis said “the woeful lack of responsible leadership … cannot be allowed to stand.

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Monica Lewinsky ‘wins the internet’ with joke about internship

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Lewinsky made light of affair with Bill Clinton in ‘I have a joke’ tweet that quickly went viral

Monica Lewinsky has made light of her affair with Bill Clinton with a tweet that quickly went viral.

“I have a joke” was trending on Twitter on Friday, prompting users to offer up one-line witticisms. When one user tweeted “I have a Charles Manson joke and it kills”, Lewinsky offered her own take: “I have an intern joke and it … nevermind.”

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Police investigate grime artist Wiley’s antisemitic tweets

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Rapper temporarily banned from Twitter and dropped by management firm after tirade

Police are investigating after the grime artist Wiley posted a tirade of antisemitic comments on Twitter and Instagram.

The musician has been dropped by his management company and temporarily banned from posting on Twitter after a series of social media posts were made on accounts belonging to him on Friday and Saturday.

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Exclusive: Saudi dissident warned by Canadian police he is a target

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Omar Abdulaziz, who was close to murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, told of threat posed by Saudi Arabia

A prominent Saudi dissident who is living in exile in Canada said he was recently warned by Canadian authorities that he was a “potential target” of Saudi Arabia and that he needed to take precautions to protect himself.

Omar Abdulaziz, a 29-year-old activist who had a close association with Jamal Khashoggi, the murdered Washington Post journalist, told the Guardian that he believed he was facing a threat to his safety and that the Canadians had credible information about a possible plan to harm him.

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Twitter deletes 170,000 accounts linked to China influence campaign

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Content focused on Covid-19 and the protests in Hong Kong and over George Floyd in the US

Twitter has removed more than 170,000 accounts the social media site says are state-linked influence campaigns from China focusing on Hong Kong protests, Covid-19 and the US protests in relation to George Floyd.

The company announced on Thursday that 23,750 core accounts – and 150,000 “amplifier” accounts that boosted the content posted by those core accounts – had been removed from the platform after being linked to an influence campaign from the People’s Republic.

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Twitter aims to limit people sharing articles they have not read

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Test to promote informed discussion will ask users if they want to retweet unread links

Twitter is trying to stop people from sharing articles they have not read, in an experiment the company hopes will “promote informed discussion” on social media.

In the test, pushed to some users on Android devices, the company is introducing a prompt asking people if they really want to retweet a link that they have not tapped on.

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Embarrassing teenage posts on Facebook? Now you can delete them

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Firm that said privacy no longer a ‘social norm’ rolls out tool to delete or archive

Facebook users no longer need to worry about their teenage posts coming back to haunt them in later life, thanks to a new tool for deleting hundreds or thousands of posts at once.

The “manage activity” feature, available now on Facebook’s mobile apps, lets users search for and remove posts from a particular time, mentioning a particular person, or within a range of dates. 

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Mark Zuckerberg criticised by civil rights leaders over Donald Trump Facebook post

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Activists say Facebook boss’s decision to leave ‘shooting threat’ up sets dangerous precedent

Civil rights leaders have criticised Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to take no action against a Facebook post from Donald Trump appearing to threaten to start shooting “looters”, after a Monday night meeting with the company’s executives ended in acrimony.

“We are disappointed and stunned by Mark’s incomprehensible explanations for allowing the Trump posts to remain up,” Vanita Gupta, Sherrilyn Ifill and Rashad Robison said in a statement. “He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump’s call for violence against protesters.

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Covid-19 misinformation: pro-Trump and QAnon Twitter bots found to be worst offenders

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Researchers find coordinated effort to promote conspiracy theory that coronavirus is a bioweapon engineered by China

Misinformation about the origins of Covid-19 is far more likely to be spread by pro-Trump, QAnon or Republican bots on Twitter than any other source, according to a study commissioned by the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology.

In late March, when the coronavirus pandemic was taking hold in the US and across much of the rest of the world, two researchers at Queensland University of Technology, Timothy Graham and Axel Bruns, analysed 2.6m tweets related to coronavirus, and 25.5m retweets of those tweets, over the course of 10 days.

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Facebook declines to take action against Trump statements

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Twitter responded to the president’s post, which suggested violence against protesters, by hiding it behind a warning label

As Twitter for the second time in a single week took unprecedented action against a tweet by Donald Trump, Facebook declined to take any enforcement action against the president’s statements.

Trump’s threatening statement on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram on Thursday night, “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” echoed a racist 1960s police chief known for ordering patrols of black neighborhoods with shotguns and dogs. It was widely interpreted as a threat and potential incitement to violence against residents of the Twin Cities who have erupted in protest against the alleged police killing of George Floyd, a black man who begged for his life as a white police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes.

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Trump signs executive order to narrow protections for social media platforms

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Move comes amid president’s feud with Twitter after it fact-checked him for the first time

Donald Trump has fired a shot across the bows of “big tech” companies by signing an executive order that aims to narrow their protections from liability over the content posted on their services.

The move came as the US president stepped up his attacks against social media giants after Twitter fact-checked him for the first time over a false assertion that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud.

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George Floyd killing: Trump calls protesters ‘thugs’ as fires erupt in Minneapolis on third night of unrest – live

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Completely surreal. Watching the Third Precinct burn surround by thousands of people in complete anarchy. pic.twitter.com/qNVNAJIlA7

Reports that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey will hold a press conference shortly.

Mayor Frey will hold a news briefing, set to start in a few minutes, about tonight's protests/burning of the 3rd Precinct. @ChaoStrib will have the livestream.

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Trump expected to sign executive order in bid to target Twitter and Facebook

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  • Move could erode legal protections for social media platforms
  • Twitter placed warning on Trump tweets that spread falsehoods

Donald Trump is preparing to sign an executive order that could erode legal protections for social media companies for content posted on their platforms, potentially opening them to liability claims over controversial content.

Related: Trump focuses on possible social media regulation as US coronavirus death toll passes milestone – live

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Zuckerberg says Facebook won’t be ‘arbiters of truth’ after Trump threat

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President announced plan to strip social media companies of liability protections after Twitter factchecked his tweets

Two years after admitting under political pressure that Facebook must do more to prevent disinformation campaigns on its platform, founder Mark Zuckerberg told Fox News on Thursday that the company should step away from regulating online speech.

Related: Trump expected to sign executive order in bid to target Twitter and Facebook

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Trump threatens social media after Twitter puts warning on his false claims

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  • Twitter added warning on tweets that spread falsehoods
  • President vows to ‘strongly regulate … or close them down’

Donald Trump has threatened to “strongly regulate” or close down social media platforms that do not meet his standards for ideological balance, a day after Twitter, for the first time, slapped a warning label on a pair of Trump tweets spreading lies about mail-in voting.

Related: George Floyd killing: sister says police officers should be charged with murder

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Twitter labels Trump’s false claims with warning for first time

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President rails against decision after his tweets on mail-in voting are marked with message: ‘Get the facts’

Twitter for the first time took action against a series of tweets by Donald Trump, labeling them with a warning sign and providing a link to further information.

Since ascending to the US presidency, Trump has used his Twitter account to threaten a world leader with war, amplify racist misinformation by British hate figures and, as recently as Tuesday morning, spread a lie about the 2001 death of a congressional aide in order to smear a cable news pundit. Throughout it all, Twitter has remained steadfast in its refusal to censor the head of state, even going so far as to write a new policy to allow itself to leave up tweets by “world leaders” that violate its rules.

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‘Last normal photo’ before lockdown proves social media hit

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UK journalist Robyn Vinter gets thousands of replies after asking people to share images of life before lockdown

Robyn Vinter knew something was happening when she saw a reply from Monica Lewinsky. Vinter, a Leeds-based journalist, had sent a Saturday morning tweet which contained a simple request: “I would like to see the last normal pic on your phone.”

Within hours she had thousands of replies, including one from the woman best known for her part in a political scandal involving the former US president Bill Clinton.

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