Washington, UNITED STATES | AFP | US President Donald Trump on Tuesday insisted he had the right to share “facts” with Russia, saying he acted to help Moscow in its “fight against ISIS and terrorism.” His Twitter message came one day after news broke that he allegedly divulged classified information …
Read More »US envoy to Qatar says news from home ‘increasingly difficult’
Doha, Qatar | AFP | The US ambassador to Qatar has expressed her dissatisfaction with political events back home in a decidedly undiplomatic message posted on social media. Dana Shell Smith, who has been the American envoy to the Gulf emirate since 2014, took to Twitter in the hours after the …
Read More »Twitter, Bloomberg team up for streaming news channel
Washington, United States | AFP | Twitter is launching a 24-hour streaming news channel in partnership with the Bloomberg news agency, in a major expansion of its video operations. Bloomberg Media chief executive Justin Smith confirmed the partnership late Sunday, retweeting a Wall Street Journal article referring to the tie-up. …
Read More »Twitter rejects US effort to unmask anti-Trump users
Washington, United States | AFP | Twitter filed suit Thursday against the US government, asking a court to back its refusal to hand over the identities of users claiming to be dissenting federal employees. The lawsuit revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and US Customs and Border Protection had sought …
Read More »Twitter drops egg icon in battle with internet ‘trolls’
San Francisco, United States | AFP | An egg icon that for years marked profiles of new Twitter users was gone Monday, a victim of “trolls” who often hid behind them to launch anonymous online attacks. For seven years, anyone who created a Twitter account automatically got an egg icon as …
Read More »Twitter makes room for more characters in tweets
San Francisco, United States | AFP | Twitter on Thursday began rolling out changes to let people pack more into tweets, subtracting from the character count names of those being replied to in posts. The latest software modification at the one-to-many messaging service comes about a year after Twitter set out …
Read More »Spanish woman sentenced for Twitter jokes about Franco-era assassination
Madrid, Spain | AFP | A Spanish court on Wednesday sentenced a young woman to jail for posting jokes on Twitter about the 1973 assassination of a senior figure in the Franco dictatorship. The National Audience, Spain’s top criminal court, found Cassandra Vera, 21, guilty of glorifying terrorism and humiliating victims …
Read More »Twitter adds ‘explore’ to make finding tweets easier
San Francisco, United States | AFP | Twitter on Thursday added an “explore” tab aimed at making it easier to find interesting content, the latest move to boost engagement at the one-to-many messaging service. The feature, which was being added first to Twitter on Apple mobile devices and was promised …
Read More »Trump takes control… of @POTUS Twitter handle
Washington, United States | AFP | Donald Trump took over Friday as the 45th US president and in doing so inherited the White House Twitter account from outgoing leader Barack Obama. In the first “social media transition” at the White House, Trump became the owner of the Twitter handle @POTUS, …
Read More »Google grabs Twitter app platform Fabric
San Francisco, United States | AFP | Google is acquiring Twitter’s mobile application developer platform Fabric, a move which could give some breathing room for the social network after charting an independent path without a suitor. Terms of the deal were not announced. Twitter last year was in talks to …
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