Communications Major

From Tumblr to Gawker, the sites and voices that defined the 2010s are gone or changed. There is no happy ending to this story.

I don't know where to post: there are too many social platforms, and the old giants are dying. The age of social media is splintering

How to take something that has flaws — and break it completely.

Twitter’s first three months under the empire of Elon Musk. Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use it for their own ends — then one made himself the CEO

. . . and for staying

Democrats are breathing easier. Republicans are crying censorship. For all of the country’s news consumers, a strange quiet has descended after a four-year bombardment of presidential verbiage.

Twitter and Facebook on Wednesday locked the accounts of President Trump, which prevents him from posting messages to his more than 88 million followers on Twitter and 35 million followers on Facebook, after he published a string of inaccurate and inflammatory messages on a day of violence in the nation’s capital.

 

The moves were an unprecedented rebuke of Mr. Trump by the social media companies, which have long been megaphones for the president.

Inside the alternate reality of the president’s Twitter account, where he absorbs and amplifies a noxious stream of disinformation.

A new MIT study shows why Twitter’s fake news problem will be so hard to solve. The study analyzed millions of tweets sent between 2006 and 2017 and came to this chilling conclusion: “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.” It also found that “the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”

In its final, climactic push for Donald Trump, the Kremlin’s troll army enlisted new members: semi-dormant propaganda accounts created as far back as 2009.

Twitter's experiment with doubling the maximum tweet length was apparently a success. The social network is expanding support for 280-character tweets to all users.

Russia was involved.

Whether you first knew # as a number sign, the pound symbol, or a tic-tac-toe board, its incarnation as the hashtag has changed language for millions.

It's been one year since Elon Musk purchased Twitter. And it has not been a good year.

 

Dozens of studies of posts on X from multiple organizations have shown a similar trend: an increase in harmful content during Mr. Musk’s tenure.

One week later, engagement is down — but the prize is still there for the taking.

Threads, from Meta, looks and feels like Twitter -- without the hate (so far).

New start-ups and other social platforms sense opportunity as Twitter grapples with changes from Elon Musk, its new owner.

Tech’s big shots have learned again and again that free speech isn’t so simple. What happens when Mr. Musk owns Twitter?

The transition of official White House social media handles is more complicated now than four years ago.

Nearly three out of four social media users think President Donald Trump should face a permanent ban or temporary suspension on social media if he spreads misinformation about the coronavirus outbreak, according to a new poll from Morning Consult.

 

The poll of 2,044 social media users found a near even split on whether Trump should face a ban or suspension — 37 percent believe he should get a permanent ban, 36 percent think Trump should be temporarily suspended. Politicians and journalists were among the most common professions that people believed should face repercussions over false or misleading information related to Covid-19.

New research from Pew found that 77 percent of Americans go online daily, but 26 percent claimed to be online “almost constantly.”

Critics have wondered whether the president’s more violent tweets — including those directed at North Korea — could merit a suspension or ban. Here’s what Twitter says.