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Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. SUBSCRIBE Twitter is embracing its role as a news platform with a slate of product updates that will personalize the stories users see. Twitter announced on Wednesday that users will soon begin to see personalized breaking news notifications at the top of their timelines, along with tweets and video that add more context to events. The feature provides a way for users to see the best tweets on breaking news events without having to follow hashtags or search for relevant users. Twitter will also bring personalization to the breaking news alerts it sends to users. “This is a long-term strategy for us to make Twitter easier to use and to see what is happening,” Keith Coleman, vice president of product at Twitter, said. “This is the first of many experiments and changes in this direction.” Users can expect to start seeing the news alerts around events at … [Read more...] about Twitter introduces personalized news alerts ahead of the World Cup

Ever said something really horrible in an online chat? Like, I’m talking a statement so lip curlingly uncomfortable that, as soon as you pressed ‘send,’ you felt shame dribble down your neck like a raw egg made of pure parental disappointment? Luckily for some of us, Snapchat now lets you delete messages you’ve sent directly to friends or in a group chat. It’s a pretty intuitive system. You press and hold on the message, at which point an option menu comes up and you can select ‘delete.’ See it in action here: This new feature – which is rolling out globally over the next few weeks – also notifies others in the chat when a message is deleted. Snapchat itself says the function is so people who have “accidentally sent a movie spoiler” or want to “clean up a message that contains a typo,” can rectify their mistake. Hopefully, it won’t be a tool for people to abuse each other and then claim they … [Read more...] about Snapchat now lets you clear chats to save face

The dust hadn’t even settled in the arena before David Leavitt’s first ill-advised joke. After an explosion killed 22 people, including children, and wounded 59 others at a Manchester, England arena, Leavitt didn’t hesitate. Being first matters, even in tragedy, and especially on Twitter. With a click of the send button, the tweet landed, with a thud, to the disbelief of nearly all who saw it. But Leavitt, a freelance writer with bylines at “CBS, AXS, Yahoo, Examiner, etc.” was oblivious. MULTIPLE CONFIRMED FATALITIES at Manchester Arena. The last time I listened to Arianna Grande I almost died too. Anyone who uses Twitter knows it isn’t exactly a wholesome place. Its alumni consists of Milo Yiannapoulos, a man who once defended pedophilia, David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Martin Shkreli, the infamous “pharma douche” who raised the price of a life-saving drug by over seven thousand percent before later being sent … [Read more...] about Twitter troll David Leavitt offers up a master class in how to be an asshole

Photographs uploaded to social media have been analysed by researchers to calculate London’s cultural “health” — and help predict the rate of gentrification. Data scientists looked at millions of images taken by people at arts, music and science culture events across the capital over the past decade, which they said can help measure prosperity. Software examined variables in the pictures such as smiling people eating, different types of arts events and even content-looking dogs. The data collected was “directly tied to the growth of certain neighbourhoods, rising home values and median income”, researchers said. The study, published in the Frontiers in Physics journal, used public images uploaded to Flickr in London and New York. They were taken by people at cultural events, such as festivals, cinemas, art exhibitions, music shows, plays, museums and tech demonstrations. Pictures of people buying papers at newspaper stands and visiting the library … [Read more...] about Social media is being used to map London’s culture hotspots

Facebook said a software bug led some users to post publicly by default regardless of their previous settings. The bug affected as many as 14 million users over several days in May.The problem, which Facebook said it has fixed, is the latest privacy scandal for the world's largest social media company.It said the bug automatically suggested that users make new posts public, even if they had previously restricted posts to "friends only" or another private setting. If users did not notice the new default suggestion, they unwittingly sent their post to a broader audience than they had intended.Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, said the bug did not affect past posts. Facebook is notifying users who were affected and posted publicly during the time the bug was active, advising them to review their posts.The news follows recent furor over Facebook's sharing of user data with device makers, including China's Huawei. The company is also still recovering from the Cambridge Analytica … [Read more...] about Facebook says privacy-setting bug affected as many as 14M