Tag: twitter

Meet Eric Feigl-Ding, the town crier of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They’re on the front lines of a relentless and overwhelming news cycle that is pushing them to the edge.”

Dialogue, Twitter-style: you get called out on social media. People pile on to you. Other people pile on to the pile-oners. Soon everyone’s anxious or angry or both, no one’s really talking (or listening), and a few tech CEOs are buying new houses in Jackson Hole.

There’s no such thing as a 140-character exegesis: the (non)-discourse around “Joker” is the latest to prove that social media is designed for emotion, not dialogue.
 

Maybe it’s time for an internet break… after you read this.

The pros and cons of building one’s brand on Twitter.

With bots, fake news, and an angry right-wing flank, Twitter is crashing against the limits of ideological neutrality.

The internet does not hate women. People hate women, and the internet allows them to do it faster, harder, and with impunity.

Spending long periods of time reading people argue with one another on the internet can be wearying. So why do we do it?

Online harassment is as serious as offline harassment, and it rarely stays “only” online.

Did Rocco DiSpirito sell his culinary soul for a paycheck and some Bertoli frozen pasta?

“I took the NASA shirts from the ‘boys’ section from where they were prominently displayed, and put them little kid eye level next to tank tops in the ‘girls’ section 20 feet away.”

Comey wrote about attempting to avoid being alone with President Trump.

Ev Williams admits that the internet is broken and suggests course corrections, apologizing for Twitter’s role in putting Trump in the White House.

Matt Nelson is a college sophomore who took WeRateDogs from spur-of-the-moment joke to data-driven fav-machine.

Rebecca Mead’s profile in The New Yorker covers the resonance of The Handmaid’s Tale in Donald Trump’s America.

Filmmaker Kyrre Lien was curious about what drives people who make hateful comments online, so he traveled the world to interview internet trolls in person.

Burger King likes being edgy, Schwan says, and it has proved that it doesn’t mind doing things that might make other brands blush. In August, as the company pushed a new spicy version of its chicken fries—a cult favorite the chain returned to the menu after a flood of social media requests—it tweeted a picture […]

On Monday, Jessica Hopper (music writer, culture critic, author of the recent and wonderfully titled The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic) asked her Twitter followers a simple question: “Gals/other marginalized folks: what was your 1st brush (in music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn’t “count”?” Needless to say, […]

Asking how am I going to cover Black Twitter is like asking how I’m going to cover American culture. I’m never going to get all of it, but I’m going to pull what I find interesting. —Dexter Thomas, as interviewed by Chava Gourarie in the Columbia Journalism Review. Earlier this week the Los Angeles Times hired Dexter […]

Not everything about #YesAllWomen makes me proud. I am particularly bitter, and disappointed, that it did not live up to its name and its promise. As a marginalized woman, even I could not provide a safe space for more than a few hours for others like me. But for those few hours, I loved what […]

April 17 marks six years since we started this community—growing from just a few readers to over a million, with people now sharing stories in dozens of different languages from hundreds of publishers. Christian Jørgensen put together a really nice Storify timeline of how the Twitter hashtag #longreads first evolved. This community also has grown […]

Eva Holland is a journalist based in the Yukon who has written for publications including Pacific Standard and SB Nation. Her latest Longreads Original, “‘It’s Yours’,” explores the life (and maybe death) of an internet commenter community, “the Horde,” that Ta-Nehisi Coates helped foster at The Atlantic. I spoke with her via email about her […]

The Op-Ed Economy meanwhile means that whatever the event, we’re treated to what is essentially “commentariat tryouts.” Twitter was already the free-floating comment section ready to wrap itself around whatever the topic is. But once CNN began reading tweets aloud on-air sometime around the first election of President Obama, and op-ed columns spread across every […]

I don’t know if I care necessarily about other people’s reactions toward opinions. And I’m not even really talking about jokes. I get attacked for opinions. People get attacked for their likes and their dislikes. And mostly they get attacked for their dislikes because to be negative in the Twittersphere is akin to hate speech […]

“For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits. Another tweet field, ‘withheld_copyright,’ if set to ‘true,’ lets you know that a tweet is in trouble—that its content has raised flags and hackles over copyright. The text of the tweet, in that case, may be suppressed. The ‘withheld_in_countries’ field can provide a list of […]

Inside CEO Dick Costolo’s efforts to perfect the company’s revenue model and compete with Google and Facebook for ad dollars: Twitter still makes money with licensing deals—Microsoft pays to get a real-time feed of tweets for its search engine, Bing. But Costolo firmly established the company’s primary identity as a communications tool that lets advertisers […]

“At Twitter, where anxiety and optimism are never far from one another, the leadership is surprisingly frank about these problems. To start with, the audience is alarmingly fickle. Nielsen estimated that user-retention rates were around 40 percent. Twitter was easy to use at an entry level, but after a while it was hard for some […]