does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers?... although the relationship between tweets and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs... an author needs three times more followers to gain only one mention more... to be or not to be on Twitte…

societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries... So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? In this Twitter map... of the US political landscape, accounts that follow one another are clustered together, and they are color-coded by the kinds of content they commonly…

What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

The vote marked the culmination of a targeted, 11-day information operation that was amplified by computational propaganda techniques and aimed to change both public perceptions and the behavior of American lawmakers...Computational propaganda... the use of [ICTs] to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”... #releaset…

On fully eight of the nine measures, “polarization increases more for the old than the young.” If Facebook is the problem, then how come the problem is worst among those who don’t use Facebook? ... polarization is accelerating fastest among those using the internet the least... social media is important. It’s just not the whole picture... two mai…

if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible.... how does one end up on this blacklist? ... mastodon.social’s community policy:... your social graph is not portable between platforms ... first principle of a workable, future-proof social ne…

You’re going to use the twit library to build a Twitter bot. It will like and re-tweet whatever you specify. It will also reply to your followers with a selection of canned responses.

thoughtfully designed user interfaces can make us a freer, more humane, and more just society, just as poorly designed ones seem to have made many of us less compassionate, less informed, and more antagonistic... for a case study, we only need to look ... online forum Nextdoor.com originally ... a way of fostering community through neighborhood-s…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

I’m not saying that these are the only principles that work on Twitter. But I think they’ve worked for me, and for my purposes.

quality filter setting ... can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior... filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follo…

As young people flock to Snapchat, news outlets are trying to showcase news on the platform both as live stories and in Discover, where nearly 20 outlets... publish unique content exclusive to Snapchat.... set to launch a redesign of its Discover section to try and boost the number of users who use Discover... While Snapchat’s core function is a m…

Jobs instructed the architect to design physical space that encouraged staff to get out of their offices and mingle, particularly with those with whom they normally wouldn’t interact. Jobs believed that serendipitous exchanges fueled innovation... The more diverse a person’s social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative... we use…

What Twitter has always been good at is allowing people to jump into any relevant conversation they want. Users can share thoughts and funny videos, but also have others engage with it in a public environment. This cocktail party aspect is where Twitter shines. Now it looks like the “cocktail party of the internet” might also be becoming the high …

BotOrNot checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

ThinkUp analyzes your Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook activity to give you fun and surprising insights, then emails them to you (or tweets at you if it's super interesting).

a big part of Twitter’s current problems stem from choosing to mimic Facebook’s ad-supported, most-eyeballs-possible business model,... forced Twitter to focus on money making strategies that irritate users... becoming more open was also a socially valuable goal, not just an economic one... Instead of becoming more open, however, Twitter turned in…

It is inevitable that Twitter will need to create some scarce, attention-rich inventory it can sell to advertisers

But cracks in Twitter’s façade had been showing already... getting noisy isn’t the only problem Twitter has today, though it seems to be one of the more pronounced symptoms of a company that has lost its direction.

Sure Facebook has 1.59 billion users, but that not my field of view. I have some 900 “friends” on Facebook. To me, it doesn’t matter who the other one billion five hundred eighty-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand one hundred users are. I can’t reach out to them to begin a relationship... Facebook and Twitter are two very different dif…

The new feature will show tweets that are sorted based on relevancy, rather than only chronology, at the top of your timeline... "While you were away," is still reserved to recap tweets when you've gone significant stretches of time between browsing sessions and may not always appear at the very top of your timeline. The new "best tweets first" f…

... just another fuss that will blow over in time? Perhaps, although users of social services often come to accept many things that might not be good for them. Even the former CTO of Facebook, Adam D’Angelo, acknowledges that there are problems with a filtered feed...It can serve to reinforce the “filter bubble” that human beings naturally form ar…

Twitter will implement an algorithm ... The degree to which this prospect upsets me is plainly absurd... Being so invested in Twitter has helped me, clearly, but it’s also trapped me... The algorithm will, inevitably, push the marginalized voices out of my awareness. It will promote the old and comfortable over the new and challenging. It will st…

the mere suggestion that an algorithm be used instead of pure reverse chronology for displaying the timeline caused people to get their pitchforks out. But I would argue that it’s absolutely necessary for Twitter to make this change — both for the growth of the network with new users, as well as the overall quality of content and connections.

"It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline."

I spent a few minutes viewing the Twitter profiles of some of the people who've followed me recently and I was struck by how much of their TweetStreams were simply RTs of other people here in Brussels. Don't they have anything original to say?

Twitter has an amazing, yet somewhat little-known Advanced Search tool to help you find exactly what we’re looking for. Looking to find your next customers? ... Want to measure the happiness of your current customers? Advanced Search is what you need... some top tips and tricks to help your business win with Twitter Advanced Search. - The Su…

With the release of its new Polls feature... you can now create super-simple polls directly on Twitter with just the click or a button or a tap on your phone... the ins and outs of Twitter polls, how to set them up, and nine engaging ways you can use polls today. - The Complete Guide to New Twitter Polls: What They Are, How They Work and 9 …