Displaying items by tag: Tweets

Twitter is an interesting company. On the one hand they act like they are a bastion of free speech and have stood up for the anonymity of some of the users. They have, in the past refused government interference in how their users post information and respond to tweets on their service. They claim to be against bullying and hate. At the same time, they have suspended accounts, removed tweets and permanently banned people for some very arbitrary reasons. They have stood their ground over this even when proven wrong about the original action. They have also left up tweets calling for violence by some while removing others, very confusing.

Twitter has been in the new a lot over the last few years. From deleting accounts of people and groups for very flimsy reasons to censoring posts that contain factual, but non-popular information. It seems that they just cannot help themselves when it comes to abusing community standards. The practice has even accelerated after Jack Dorsey left the company as CEO. The seemingly one-sided application of community standards has led to much criticism of the platform. The level of disappointment even led to Elon Musk buying 9.2% of the company and gaining a seat on the board of directors (not that this will accomplish much).

After Twitter released its annual financial results for the 2013. from which we could observe a slower increase in the number of users, discussion began on possible reasons for this negative trend . In the latest study, the research house eMarketer presented the growth projections of the number of users of the social network for the next five years. They predict that the negative trend will continue, so in 2014 the number of active users will increase by only 11.6%, and by the 2018 this will decrease even further to 6.4%.

Twitter has taken over the company MoPub, which is known for its own advertising platform for mobile devices. MoPub was founded in 2010, and has its own advertising platform for which they claim that it serves over a billion ads a day to users of applications on Android and iOS.

While some people would describe it as just consumerist holiday that should be despised, others will welcome the Valentine's with a smile on their face knowing that this day will pay special attention to their beloved ones or someone who they like (at least).

Twitter celebrated their sixth anniversary back in March. During the celebration the company announced that they had reached over 140 million active users per month and that there are around 340 million tweets made daily. [This is not a bad achievement, but it does make use wonder about the sheer amount of inane information that gets broadcast around the globe every day; 140 words at a time. –Ed]

Remember the Faceboook malware we warned you about? You remember the one that relied on the fact that people love to see pictures of themselves on the internet? Well it looks like either the same group that was behind that malware or another equally clever group has moved from Faceboook to Twitter. We have heard multiple reports of tweets showing up that claim to have a link to a picture of the user. Unfortunately due to the widespread use of shortened links it is hard to spot many malicious payloads. Fortunately in this case you can identify the bad link by the .ru at the end… for now.