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Posted by Mandy Nagy on April 03, 2014 2 Comments

The government of Turkey says it is lifting a recent ban on Twitter after a court ruling declared that the ban violated freedom of expression. From the Associated Press: Turkey's government said Thursday it is lifting its ban on Twitter, a day after the country's highest court...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 15, 2014 16 Comments
Demos, a left-wing Soros-Open Society affiliated UK think tank, did a study of "slurs" on Twitter. The Daily Mail Reports, Just how racist is Twitter?
10,000 racist tweets are sent ever day, a major new study into racism on social networks has discovered. Research by the think tank Demos found the biggest insult was 'white boy' Researchers analysed 126,975 English-language tweets from across the globe over a 9-day period in the biggest ever study of Twitter racism. Researchers revealed the most common racial slurs used on the micro-blogging site included ‘whitey’ and ‘pikey’. However, as many as 70% of tweets using such language were deemed to be using slurs in non-derogatory fashion. 'This sparks the debate about the extent to which Twitter truly is a platform for racism and abusive language,' the report claims. Jamie Bartlett, Director of CASM at Demos and author of the report, said: 'Twitter provides us with a remarkable window into how people talk, argue, debate, and discuss issues of the day. 'While there are a lot of racial slurs being used on Twitter, the overwhelming majority of them are not used in an obviously prejudicial or hateful way.
Here's the chart from the Demos Report (the percentages are of the total of tweets identified as containing slurs:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 18, 2014 28 Comments
We have noted before the tensions between white liberal feminists and non-white liberal feminists. Sometimes it breaks out into a Twitter War, as it did when #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag unleashed bitter intra-feminist racial grievances. Or when Joan Walsh of Salon.com got into a twitter war with some ladies who did not like Walsh's condescending "professional left" attitude towards women of color, Dem Base Fractures Into Twitter War And Charges Of Racism Against Professional Left. This past week, for reasons unknown to me, the eruption used the hashtag #WhiteWomanPrivilege. It was like Festivus, the airing of grievances: There was not enough popcorn growing in the States of Iowa and Nebraska combined to cover this outbreak of intra-feminist racial greivances. Here are some of my favorites, but by all means scroll through the hashtag -- but don't get any butter on the couch please:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 21, 2013 47 Comments
Yesterday was the worst Twitter day of all time. Or at least the worst that I remember. Some lady no one had ever heard of and who had about 100 followers at the time sent the Tweet above. The tweet went viral.  Some guy at Gawker is claiming credit for finding it, although a lot of people credit the big viral boost to someone at Buzzfeed who has over 100,000 followers: https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/414103011464454145 https://twitter.com/danielwein/status/414103716892250112 https://twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/414420362042941440 Whoever started it, plenty of websites picked up on it and ran with it to feed the mob and not miss out on clicks and eyeballs. By the time I saw it, long after she became a hunted woman, my first impression was similar to that of John Nolte at Breitbart.com: Looks like the type of "white privilege" claptrap we read almost weekly at Salon.com or Slate.com.  Some liberal white person coming to grips with her privilege and wanting the whole world to know about it.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on November 15, 2013 2 Comments
Pew Research is out with another installment on its study of News Use across Social Media Platforms, some of which may be helpful to activists in the political grassroots movement. Facebook leads the way as a social media platform for news consumers.  64% of US adults are on Facebook, with 47% of those using the site to obtain news - this translates to 30% of the US population using Facebook as a source of news. Though in a previous Pew Research report (noted below), most indicated they do not necessarily go to Facebook seeking out news, rather, they get the news while they're there for other reasons. In contrast, only 16% of US adults use Twitter, with just over half of those using it for news, which translates to 8% of the population using Twitter as a source for news.  And while reddit's users are very active news consumers, a very tiny fraction of the US population is even using reddit at all. From the Pew Research report:
The proportions who get news, combined with the total reach of a site, show how many U.S. adults are learning about events and issues through each social networking site. Facebook is by far the largest social networking site among U.S. adults, and with half of its users getting news there, is also the largest among U.S. adults when it comes to getting news. As discussed in an earlier report, roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use the site, and half of those users get news there—amounting to 30% of the general population. YouTube has the next greatest reach in terms of general usage, at 51% of U.S. adults. Thus, even though only a fifth of its users get news there, that amounts to 10% of the adult population, which puts it on par with Twitter. Twitter reaches just 16% of U.S. adults, but half (8% of U.S. adults) use it for news. reddit is a news destination for nearly two-thirds of its users (62%). But since just 3% of the U.S. population uses reddit, that translates to 2% of the population that gets news there.
social-media-news-users twitter-news

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 11, 2013 44 Comments
A conversation I had with myself on Twitter this morning. Just because I could. (added) Be sure to read Anne's study on how embarrassed Republicans were of the Republican Brand long before the current "shutdown," New study sheds light on why Republicans won’t call themselves Republican. Also available on Storify. https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/statuses/388635508047216641 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/statuses/388635827816771584 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/statuses/388636232642600960 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/statuses/388636692166348800

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 20, 2013 26 Comments

or more precisely, who they really are. Allan Brauer, Communications Director for the Sacramento Democratic Party wished Amanda Carpenter's children slow painful deaths from incurable diseases (via Twitchy): Amanda Carpenter, by the way, used to be a speech writer for Jim DeMint, and now is a speech writer...

Posted by Mandy Nagy on September 18, 2013 15 Comments

Researchers studying China's equivalent of Twitter have found that anger tends to be the most influential emotion on the social network.  It spreads the fastest and most broadly, more than several other categories of emotion.  The findings could offer insight into studying how information spreads...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 18, 2013 6 Comments
With a news cylce measured in seconds and minutes, not even hours, there are plenty of mainstream media mistakes, as I wrote yesterday, One lesson for mass killings: Don’t trust media reports for at least 24 hours. Piers Morgan, for example, ran wild over the fact that the shooter used an AR-15, except it turned out the shooter didn't. So Morgan deleted some of his inaccurate and embarrassing tweets about the use of an AR-15 in the Navy Yard shooting.  In so doing, Morgan both deleted inaccurate information and his own political embarrassment. That makes it harder for people (like me) to address Morgan's politics on gun control -- evidence has been removed from the internet. Well, fortunately, Twitchy grabbed the screen shots before Morgan's deletion: Twitchy Morgan AR-15 deleted tweets But in many cases, someone's Twitter or blog history is important in itself. With a blog entry, one can update and correct, as Buzzfeed did yesterday, and Google Cache often (but not always) saves the original.  But with Twitter, there is no ability to change the tweet itself, only to issue a new tweet correcting the prior (Morgan has not done that, btw), and it is much harder to reconstruct deleted tweets. The same issue exists as to the NY Daily News' now infamous Cover which was sent out on Twitter, and resulted in this conversation: https://twitter.com/brithume/status/380086436835241984 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/380312186456793088

Posted by Mandy Nagy on September 04, 2013 1 Comment

If you've ever tried to use Twitter search to find someone's old tweet, you've likely been disappointed to find that the results leave you digging through only the most recent tweets, and that's if they even match your search terms at all. I've mentioned previously in...

Posted by Mandy Nagy on September 01, 2013 6 Comments

Edward Snowden and the NSA debate seem to have lost some significant momentum on Twitter in light of the current discussion about what the US will or won't be doing about the situation in Syria. Business Insider noticed that Syria Tensions Have Knocked The NSA Spying...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 17, 2013 20 Comments
Remember when Joan Walsh of non-tokenist Salon.com kicked off an intra-progressive Twitter war after writing:
“I deeply resent people who insist that white progressives who criticize Obama are deluding themselves that they’re his ‘base,’ when his ‘base’ is actually not white progressives, but people of color.”
Sure you do, Dem Base Fractures Into Twitter War And Charges Of Racism Against Professional Left: https://twitter.com/joanwalsh/status/55783212164718592 http://twitter.com/joanwalsh/status/55841811423436800 http://twitter.com/joanwalsh/status/55795875955478528 Nothing brings out the popcorn faster at LI than intra-progressive racial grievances. And this past week possibly was the largest bucket of popcorn ever seen upon the face of the Earth, with the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen.   vid-spacer The guy they're talking about, Hugo Schwyzer, also is known as the Pasadena Porn Professor, who we have covered at College Insurrection, and you can read more about at The Other McCain. (By this point you're thinking, this is the weirdest Saturday Night Card Game post ever.) However it started, as convoluted as it was, the result was pure hysteria (via Al Jazeera)(click on the date of each tweet to see responses to it, some of which were more "interesting" than the tweet itself):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2013 23 Comments

We've all heard of the problems faced on Twitter with the #TwitterGulag resulting from false claims of harassment and/or spam. It's also a problem on Facebook, as detailed by Ruthie Blum (sister of John Podhoretz) at The New York Observer. Blum speaks of the problem faced by pro-Israel writers on Facebook...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 06, 2013 17 Comments

I wish I had put this list together myself. But the credit goes to John Nolte of Breitbart.com on Twitter. [View the story "Top Ten Things Media Found More Important Than al Qaeda" on Storify]...

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