Twitter Is Being Sued For Providing Material Support To The Islamic State

Reuters: Twitter sued by U.S. widow for giving voice to Islamic State

Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) is being sued by the widow of an American killed in Jordan who accuses the social media company of giving a voice to Islamic State, adding to the pressure to crack down on online propaganda linked to terrorism.

Tamara Fields, a Florida woman whose husband Lloyd died in the Nov. 9 attack on the police training center in Amman, said Twitter knowingly let the militant Islamist group use its network to spread propaganda, raise money and attract recruits.

Lawyers specializing in terrorism said Fields faces an uphill battle, though the case could lead to more calls for social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook Inc (FB.O) to take down posts associated with terrorist groups.

In her complaint filed on Wednesday, Fields said San Francisco-based Twitter had until recently given Islamic State, also known as ISIS, an "unfettered" ability to maintain official Twitter accounts.

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More News On Twitter Being Sued For Providing Material Support To The Islamic State

Florida Woman Sues Twitter for Giving ISIS a Platform -- Wired
Lawsuit accuses Twitter of providing material support to ISIS -- The Hill
Twitter sued by widow for alleged aid to ISIL -- USA Today
Widow sues Twitter over ISIS' 'unfettered ability' to use platform -- FOX News
Twitter Enabled ISIS Recruitment And Propaganda Efforts, Lawsuit Alleges -- IBTimes
Twitter sued for helping ISIS -- RT
A terrorist killed this woman’s husband, and now she’s suing Twitter -- The Verge
Twitter provides material support to ISIS, lawsuit alleges -- Ars Technica
Can Islamic State victim’s widow win suit against Twitter? -- Alison Frankel, Reuters

CSN Editor: Twitter's defense sounds eerily like the defense that gun manufacturers use .... "it's not their fault that their users commit crimes". Will this defense fly .... I am not sure. But if she wins her case .... it will definitely social media as we know it.

Twitter Considering To Increase Character Limit To As High As 10,000

Forbes: Report: Twitter Explores 10,000 Character Limit For Tweets

Twitter’s investors have long clamored for bold changes that would reenergize the company, attract new users and lift the stock out of its doldrums. Three months into his tenure as permanent CEO, Jack Dorsey appears to be listening to their pleas.

Twitter is said to be working on a feature that would allow users to create tweets with as many as 10,000 characters, obliterating the 140-character limit that’s been synonymous with the microblogging service since its inception, according to a report in the tech blog Re/code.

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More News On Reports That Twitter Is Considering Increasing Its Character Limit To As High As 10,000

Twitter considering 10,000-character limit for tweets - report -- Reuters
Twitter to Expand Tweet’s 140-Character Limit to 10,000 -- WSJ
Twitter’s rumored new character limit would allow 2.5-page, single-spaced essays -- Washington Post
Twitter May Increase Tweets To 10,000 Characters, But Hide All Past 140 -- Tech Crunch
Twitter may soon let you write 2,000-word tweets -- CNet
So long, 140! Twitter may soon let you share 10,000 characters per post -- Mashable
Here’s What 10,000 Characters Looks Like -- Tech Crunch

The Complete Guide To Twitter’s Language And Acronyms

The Complete Guide To Twitter’s Language And Acronyms -- Twitter

The beauty and challenge of Twitter is stuffing your most sophisticated thoughts and feelings into a measly 140 characters (or less). Unfortunately, our traditional methods of communication have proven to be a poor training ground for micro-messaging, and even the most savvy platform users have sighed in exasperation as those bright red negative character signs mock our basic intelligence. But, perhaps even worse, no good tweet is ever going to be 140 characters because it’s impossible to share, respond or reference a tweet that’s already at it’s max. If you want to make a big statement with a small message, you have to trim the fat.

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My Comment: A useful and brief list.

Twitter's Users Tweet Over 400 Million Times Per Day

Twitter's 140 Million Users Tweet Over 400 Million Times Per Day -- MSNBC

I currently follow 159 users on Twitter and I occasionally get overwhelmed by how much they tweet. It's intimidating to imagine that these tweets amount to only a tiny fraction of the 400 million or so tweets generated each day.

Forbes' Tomio Geron reports that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo mentioned the social media network's latest statistics during a talk at a conference organized by the Economist.

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My Comment: Only 400 million times a day? I thought it was more.

Twitter Hits 500 Million Registered Users

Twitter 'To Hit 500 Million Registered Users' -- The Telegraph

Twitter is set to hit 500 million registered users later today, according to a report.

The popular microblogging company, which processes more than a billion tweets a week, is set to hit the milestone figure later today, claims Twopcharts, a third party Twitter analysis company.

However, the 500 million relates to the total number of registered accounts, and fails to reveal how many are active.

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on third party figures and said that the company only tracks how many active users there are using the site. There are no plans from the company to announce a registered user figure milestone.

Presently there are 100 million active Twitter accounts; a figure which was announced by the company’s executives last September.

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My Comment: And a number that is still climbing .... all be it slowly.

Is Facebook And Twitter Addictive?

Facebook And Twitter Are More Addictive Than Cigarettes Or Alcohol, Study Finds -- FOX News

A new study suggests that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol.

A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices.

Participants in the week-long study were polled via BlackBerry smartphones seven times per day and asked to report when they experienced a desire within the past 30 minutes, and whether or not the succumbed to that desire. They were also asked to gauge each desire on a scale from mild to “irresistible.”

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My Comment: I could not care less about Twitter and Facebook, but the children of my friends are certainly attached to these websites.

How To Manipulate Social Movements By Hacking Twitter

Image credit: Leo Espinosa

Are You Following A Bot? -- The Atlantic

How to manipulate social movements by hacking Twitter.

One day last February, a Twitter user in California named Billy received a tweet from @JamesMTitus, identified in his profile as a “24 year old dude” from Christchurch, New Zealand, who had the avatar of a tabby cat. “If you could bring one character to life from your favorite book, who would it be?,” @JamesMTitus asked. Billy tweeted back, “Jesus,” to which @JamesMTitus replied: “honestly? no fracking way. ahahahhaa.” Their exchange continued, and Billy began following @JamesMTitus. It probably never occurred to him that the Kiwi dude with an apparent love of cats was, in fact, a robot.

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Twitter Users Including Sarah Brown Hit By Malicious Hacker Attack

An example of the "mouseover" code exploit being used on Twitter: this example is harmless but many others are not. Source: Sophos.com

From The Guardian:

Bug in new-look site exploited to redirect viewers on Twitter.com if they just hover over a link - but users of third-party software are safe (updated)

Update: the flaw has been fixed, and Twitter now says it is safe to use twitter.com again.

Sarah Brown is among thousands of Twitter users who have been hit by malicious use of a security flaw in the redesigned Twitter site.

The wife of the former prime minister Gordon Brown, who has more than a million followers on Twitter, unknowingly sent a link which contained malicious code that would redirect anyone who moved their mouse over it - but didn't click it - to a Japanese hard-core pornography site.

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Twitter: The New Stage For Hacker Hijinks

Among the many Twitter pages found to be spreading a worm this morning was the Whitehouse. (Credit: Websense Labs)

From CNET:

Generating a news frenzy usually reserved for Apple product launches, pranksters turned Twitter into wormville this morning. The fast-spreading exploits proved two things: Twitter is undoubtedly now a mainstream service, and it's joined the ranks of big-time tech companies as a target for hackers.

Security experts interviewed by CNET say the messaging service has done a fair job of protecting itself so far, but will have to be more careful with its coding if it wants to be trusted for news aggregation, integration on corporate sites, and as a useful international communication tool.

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The New Twitter Isn't Nearly New Enough

From Daily Finance:

As a Twitter user, I was interested in seeing just how different Twitter.com's new incarnation actually is, especially because it's been billed as the most significant product release for the micro-messaging service in a long time.

Would it finally give me a reason to ditch my Twitter client and go back to Twitter.com? Would it finally produce a revenue model commensurate with the company's stiff venture capital valuation and immense promise? Would it leap tall buildings in a single bound? Alas, none of the above. The new Twitter is fairly tame -- and fairly indicative of the troubles that have beset the popular but not easily monetizable company.

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Congress To Archive Every Tweet Ever Posted Publicly

From The BBC:

The Library of Congress is to archive every single public tweet ever made.

Twitter says since they started in 2006, billions of tweets have been created and 55m are sent every day.

The digital archive will include tweets from President Barack Obama on the day he was elected as well as the first tweet from co-founder Jack Dorsey.

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Twitter Has 105M Users, Says Co-Founder Biz Stone

From Computer World:

IDG News Service - Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams shared some long-awaited usage figures for the service and sought to assure developers that Twitter is becoming a stable platform for building applications, as they kicked off its first developer conference today in San Francisco.

Twitter has 105 million registered users, with 300,000 new users signing up every day, Stone said, opening Twitter's Chirp conference at the Palace of Fine Arts before an audience just shy of 1,000 developers. That user figure is more than a recent estimate from comScore, which pegged Twitter's user base at 65 million.

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Twitter To Have Paid Tweets Show Up In Searches

From ABC News:

Twitter introduces tweets paid for by advertisers, to show up first in search results.

Twitter announced Tuesday that it is introducing advertising by allowing companies to pay to have their messages show up first in searches on its site.

The debut of "Promoted Tweets" comes as Twitter increasingly faces questions about how it can turn its wide usage into profits.

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Twitter Reveals Business Model

From Technology Review:

"Promoted Tweets" will bring ads into the stream of real-time conversation.

At long last, Twitter has announced its business model. The company has grown explosively since its launch in 2007 and there has been intense speculation about how it could make its popular service profitable. The plan is to use an advertising model that it calls "Promoted Tweets."

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Has Twitter Reached Its Peak?

Barracuda says that Twitter's user growth has almost stopped

From The Guardian:

Micro-blogging service Twitter's user growth has almost levelled off since September 2009, according to a study.

Twitter's growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study.

Growth in the micro-blogging service's number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks.

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Airline Twitter Promotion Attracts Huge Crowds

JetBlue employee Morgan Johnston took this photo of the people who showed up in the Financial District when the airline launched an ambitious campaign to give away free tickets by telling Twitter users where to show up. (Credit: Morgan Johnston)

From CNET:

NEW YORK--It was apparently one step short of a cattle stampede when low-cost airline JetBlue used its Twitter account to announce that as part of its 10th anniversary celebration it would be giving out about a thousand free round-trip tickets at three undisclosed locations in Manhattan on Wednesday.

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Twitter Flies Past Its 10 Billionth Tweet

The growing number of tweets per day (Source: Twitter)

From The Guardian:

Twitter passed another milestone when a person unknown posted the system's 10 billionth tweet.

Overnight, Twitter flew past the 10bn tweet milestone, according to the GigaTweet site, which tracks the microblogging service. It has taken more than three years to get there. However, Twitter's rapid growth means that the next 10bn should be knocked off in 203 days.

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Twitter Attack Affects Thousands Of Users

Twitter has been hit by two phishing scams in a week, and is warning users not to click on suspicious links in direct messages

From The Telegraph:

The microblogging site has been hit by a second phishing attack in a week.

Twitter users have been warned not to click links in some tweets, after the microblogging service fell victim to its second phishing attack in a week.

Cyber criminals are using the service to trick people in to giving away their username and password for the site. Users have been receiving direct messages from friends on the site which contain a shortened link. When users click on that link, they are directed to a malicious website, which looks just like the Twitter home page, where they are prompted to enter their login details.

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Can Twitter Make Money?

Twitter and the Real-Time Web: On the real-time Web, information is created and consumed instantly, often through blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The phenomenon exploded last year, as the surging use of URL-shortening services indicates; Web addresses must be shrunk in order for links to fit inside 140-character tweets. Twitter attracted new users and expanded its reach, but it still carries a lot of babble. Twitter has experienced exponential user growth in three years. But the rate slowed at the end of 2009. Credit: Tommy McCall

From Technology Review:

Twitter plans to become the leader in instant news--and make itself into a sustainable business in the process.

At the microblogging company Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, in the sixth-floor conference room, founder Evan Williams was declining to tell me anything about the company's strategies to earn revenues when, suddenly, his cofounder Biz Stone blurted, "Whoa!" It was 10:10 a.m. on January 7, and it would prove to be the latest Twitter Moment, showing how far the service has moved beyond its early status as an amplifier of personal minutiae and confession. A minor earthquake had just struck: a magnitude 4.1 temblor centered 45 miles to the southeast. Throughout the Bay Area, thousands of Twitter users seized their smart phones or PCs to peck out 140-character-or-less tweets--updates in the form of text messages, Web-based instant messages, or posts on Twitter's website. Quake-related tidbits coursed through the company's servers at the rate of 296 per minute, according to tracking done by the U.S. Geological Survey.

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Yahoo Turns On The Twitter Firehose

From CNET:

Yahoo has agreed to purchase access to the Twitter firehose, adding real-time Twitter content to both search results and Yahoo profiles. The company has been featuring Twitter content in search results for some time but plans to augment those results now that it will receive content directly from Twitter rather than having to pull it from the service through public APIs, said Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.

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