Tag Archives | Twitter

New York Times Caves To Twitter Pressure

By on April 2, 2013 in News 0

Writing at PandoDaily, disinformation author Paul Carr castigates the New York Times for changing its biography of Yvonne Brill after the Twitterverse ganged up on the Gray Lady:

Another victory for the (fictional) Internet Community! Today the New York Times was forced to edit Douglas Martin’s obituary of rocket scientist Yvonne Brill (pictured left, played by Alastair Sim) after twitterers and bloggers took offense at the lede:

“She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.”

The outrage was pretty well summed up in a post on i09, titled “The New York Times fails miserably in its obituary for rocket scientist Yvonne Brill”…

“The blowback has been considerable. Since its publication yesterday, the obituary has attracted a firestorm of remonstration on Twitter. A small sampling of tweets captures the air of incredulity:”

Blowback!

… Read the rest

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Program Uses Algorithms To Tweet As You After Your Death

By on March 15, 2013 in News 21

If social media is what you did while alive, does this mean you are living forever? CNET News on the app Liveson, which continues to generate tweets based on your personality and syntax, in a sense preserving you into eternity:

You might think your online fans will lose interest when you kick the bucket, but an upcoming app says it will let you keep tweeting from beyond the grave.

LivesOn will host Twitter accounts that continue to post updates when users [die]. Developers claim the app’s artificial-intelligence engine will analyze your Twitter feed, learn your likes and syntax, and then post tweets in a similar vein when you’re gone. You’ll become an AI construct, a proverbial ghost in the machine.

The app will launch in March. People who sign up will be asked to appoint an executor who will have control of the account.

… Read the rest

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Fast Food Fight: “McDonald’s” Hacks Burger King’s Twitter Account

By on February 19, 2013 in News 5

My guess is that Burger King’s password was “whopper” – any other guesses? From GigaOm:

Even by the standards of social media fiascos, this one’s a doozy. On Monday, Burger King’s official Twitter feed announced the chain had been sold to its rival and began posting pro-McDonald’s messages and tales of employee drug use.

The strange Twitter activity took place after hackers apparently took control of Burger King’s account and replaced its name and image with the McDonald’s logo. Here is a screenshot of what followers of @burgerking saw on Monday:

The blue checkmark beside the @burgerking name indicate that this is indeed Burger King’s official Twitter account. Other tweets included…

[continues at GigaOm]… Read the rest

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Warrantless Government Requests For Your Twitter And Google Data Continue To Increase

By on February 4, 2013 in News 4

It seems that using email or social networks, nothing is actually private. The Atlantic Wire reports:

Twitter has released its second biannual Transparency Report and — what do you know? — Twitter is still giving away more user information requested by the U.S. government than ever, and without a warrant.

Twitter got 815 total requests in the last six months, and more than 80 percent of the U.S. government’s asks on user data came without a warrant. Google, too, has seen an uptick in government requests, reporting a total 21,389 requests for information in 2012.

U.S. officials are asking for more of what we’re doing from more of our daily Internet activities — typically without getting a court’s permission. Google, however, is lobbying [for better privacy protection], and this year the Senate will vote on an updated version of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that requires a warrant for all email and private communication stored over the cloud.

… Read the rest

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Artist Creates Roach Controlled by Twitter

By on December 29, 2012 in News 3

ockroaches are among the very few lifeforms for which I have no sympathy, but I’m wondering if PETA will feel the same…

Via CNET:

…artist Brittany Ransom created Twitter Roach — a discoid cockroach that can be controlled through tweets that it receives on the popular microblogging service.

As it turns out, humans can actually control cockroaches with a device called RoboRoach — a tiny electronic backpack that attaches to a cockroach and stimulates the bug’s antenna nerves, enabling the controller to turn the insect left or right with the press of a button.

Ransom built upon the Roboroach concept and added some Arduino hardware and custom-programmed software to link the bug to Twitter. While on display at the “Life, in some form” art exhibition by the Chicago Artists Coalition, visitors could send the @TweetRoach account commands such as “#TweetRoachLeft” and #TweetRoachRight.”

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Insane Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theories

By on December 19, 2012 in News 72

Disinfonauts, you know who these people are. Drown them out. Gawker compiles some of the worst, tasteless sentiment from the fringes of American society:

If you’ve got a certain kind of Facebook friend — an End-the-Fed, mechanical-elves, Monsanto-causes-cancer, Nibiru-fearing cousin, say — you may have already heard the “news” that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza’s father was a key witness in a congressional hearing about a banking scandal. Or the theory that the new Batman movie predicted the shooting. Or that The Hunger Games did. None of these conspiracy theories are true, obviously. But they’re all over the internet.

As usual, it only took a couple of days for the weird online gutter-spaces where the far left, far right, hyper-libertarian and new age kooks all hang out to gurgle out a handful of theories about the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., that ended with 27 deaths. They are, each, stupider than the last, though no less fascinating, in a car-crash way, than they usually are…

[check out the insanity at Gawker]… Read the rest

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Romney: The Rise of the Twitterbots

By on November 20, 2012 in News 16

Picture: todo tiempo pasado fue mejor

The controversey surrounding Mitt Romney’s twitter account continues. According to The Guardian, in July of this year, Mitt commanded around half a million followers compared to Barack’s 18 million. Then suddenly all that changed and thousands of adoring fans emerged, as if by magick, from the digital wilderness:

a couple of students at the Oxford Internet Institute asked themselves a question: what’s the probability that Romney’s new followers are genuine? Their account of the researchmakes fascinating reading. They started from the empirical observation that fake accounts created by Twitterbots tend to have few or no followers. Then they picked 20 Twitter accounts comparable in size to Obama’s and Romney’s and examined the statistical properties of the 150,000 newest followers in each. What they were looking for, of course, was the proportion of new followers who had few or zero followers and were therefore likely to be the product of bots.

… Read the rest

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Predicting Trends Beforehand

By on November 2, 2012 in News 1

In this age of constant advertisement and brand placement, trending topics on Twitter have become a great free way for advertisers to get their message in front of more potential customers. The only problem is that no one can predict what will be come a trending topic, at least until now.  A professor at M.I.T. in conjunction with one of his students, developed an algorithm that they claim will be 95% accurate in predicting those trending topics as much four to five hours before they are trending.

Picture: Unmadindu (CC)

Via M.I.T.

At the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks at MIT in November, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student, Stanislav Nikolov, will present a new algorithm that can, with 95 percent accuracy, predict which topics will trend an average of an hour and a half before Twitter’s algorithm puts them on the list — and sometimes as much as four or five hours before.

… Read the rest

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