Tag: Social Media

Public Health to Collect Troves of Online Data to Target the Vaccine Hesitant

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has announced a contract with a social media intelligence collection firm based in the U.K. to obtain data on vaccine hesitant individuals in order to be able to deliver targeted messaging to break through their hesitancy, contract details indicate. “In preparation for increased vaccination education, promotion, and outreach,…


Twitter’s New Safety Chief Gives Key Update on ‘General Amnesty’ of Banned Accounts

Twitter’s new head of Trust and Safety has announced that a “general amnesty” review of suspended user accounts will be completed within around 30 days, with the announcement coming around a month after Twitter CEO Elon Musk pledged to start reinstating banned accounts that hadn’t broken the law or engaged in “egregious spam.” Ella Irwin,…


Twitter’s Website Working as Normal After Worldwide Outage

Twitter’s website version is working as usual again after it appeared to stop working for thousands of people across the globe on Dec. 28. Around 7:40 p.m. E.T., Twitter users were able to access the social media platform via apps on their mobiles or other devices, but many trying to log in via internet browsers were…


How an Occupied Twitter Ruined Countless Lives

Commentary From the beginning of the COVID panic, it felt that something was very wrong. Never had a pandemic, much less a seasonal pathogenic wave, been treated as a quasi-military emergency requiring the upending of all freedoms and rights. What made it more bizarre was how alone those of us who objected felt until very…


Ron DeSantis Offered Libs of TikTok Creator Refuge in Governor’s Mansion During Doxxing Threat

When the press doxxed Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said she could stay in the governor’s mansion. “If you don’t feel safe, you or your family, if you need a place to go, to hide, to stay, you can come to the governor’s mansion. We have a guest house for…


Elon Musk Says ‘Almost Every Conspiracy Theory That People Had About Twitter Turned Out to Be True’

Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, claimed on Dec. 24 that nearly every conspiracy theory about the social media platform has turned out to be true. Musk made the comments during an interview on the “All-In” podcast, where he also discussed the so-called “Twitter files” that were initially released earlier this month via independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari…


Elon Musk Rolls out ‘View Count’ Feature for Twitter

Twitter owner Elon Musk on Thursday announced, and then rolled out, a feature on the social media platform that allows users to see how many people viewed a post. “Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video. Shows how much…


Notes From the Digital Gulag

Commentary As the author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” I guess I should not be surprised to find myself squarely in the digital gulag—banished, perhaps permanently, from Twitter and Facebook. Twitter permanently suspended my account several weeks ago, mere days before Elon Musk took over the helm. Although I cannot…


Musk Says Twitter’s New CEO Could Be MrBeast, World’s Biggest YouTuber

Elon Musk has said he’s open to the possibility that Jimmy Donaldson, the world’s biggest YouTuber known as MrBeast, could become Twitter’s new CEO. After earlier suggesting he would eventually quit being the chief executive at Twitter after taking over the social media platform in October, Musk ran a poll recently asking if he should…


Turn Your Eyes Away

Commentary How long will mainstream media ignore massive protests in China, Brazil, Iran, and Holland against political oppression and state-sponsored election interference in the United States? If millions of pro-democracy protesters in China call for the end of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but is largely ignored by the U.S. leadership, has an injustice really…