Wired: Twitter’s vast metadata haul is a privacy nightmare for users. “Metadata is everywhere. Everything you tweet, every picture you take, and every status update you post on Facebook. It’s used by police and security forces to identify people who try to hide their identities and locations, while associated metadata in selfies can inadvertently ensnare criminals unaware that the data can destroy their alibi. And metadata on Twitter can also be used in extremely precise identification each and every one of us – according to a new paper by researchers at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute.”
Wired
Wired: Forget New Users. Twitter Needs to Find New Ads
Wired: Forget New Users. Twitter Needs to Find New Ads. “Thursday, Twitter said it pulled in $638 million in total ad revenue in the quarter—down one percent compared to the same time last year. The root of the decline? Direct-response ads and promoted tweets, the ad formats most at home in Twitter’s fast-scrolling, constantly refreshing stream, are fading. As Facebook and Snapchat can tell you, the present and future of advertising is video. To fully be a part of it, Twitter’s going to have to either fundamentally rethink its platform, or find a new kind of ad future.”
WIRED: Twitter Is Running Out of Time To Get Real About Fighting Abuse
WIRED: Twitter Is Running Out of Time To Get Real About Fighting Abuse. “Yes, Twitter walks a fine line in balancing its identity as an open network for all views while at the same time reserving the right to police content so that a mob can’t overpower and harass a single user. And in a lot of ways, it’s made progress: it explicitly banned revenge porn last year. It routinely works with groups to refine its anti-abuse tools, and it hasn’t shied away from banning other high-profile users in the past, including pop star Azealia Banks and right-wing troll Chuck C. Johnson. But some say Twitter is running out of excuses in its failure to fully address this problem.”
