Cyberculture agenda: Minecraft video game, target of Turkey’s Family Ministry … Twitter vs. Trolls

Turkish ministry has launched an investigation into video game “Minecraft” on grounds that it encourages violence
Diplomats summoned for disciplinary hearings over remarks critical of PM and foreign minister, and could be dismissed.

Have you ever checked a social media site during a meeting at work?

Perhaps slyly, peeking at your smartphone under the desk?

If so, you’re far from alone, as a new study has revealed that almost three-quarters of us check platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram during meetings.

In less than a decade Twitter has allowed top celebrities to quickly build up followings of tens of millions of people on the platform, essentially to do with what they will.

Twitter has proven particularly effective as a way for musicians to build an audience, with seven of the ten most popular profiles on the network belonging to pop stars.

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Helped by the MPAA, Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood launched a secret campaign to revive SOPA-like censorship efforts in the United States.

The MPAA and Hood want Internet services to bring website blocking and search engine filtering back to the table after the controversial law failed to pass.

Aram Zucker-Scharff, a content strategist with CFO Publishing, has a new piece about the results of a casual independent experiment he conducted on Facebook’s News Feed. His experiment — which he himself calls “not-so-scientific” — only lasted two weeks, and, as he notes, the analytics data he’s working with is less than perfectly accurate. But it might still be worthwhile to take a look at a few of his findings, particularly for people running Facebook pages for news organizations.

 

Verified-account

Would you pay for that little blue checkmark next to your Twitter handle?

Twitter and Google are hooking up.

The two have signed a deal that gives the search giant access to Twitter’s firehose, meaning that tweets will show up in search results as soon as they have been published.

Currently, Google has to proactively mine Twitter for tweets, meaning that only a select percentage appear in search queries (usually from high-profile users).

 

In Candid Mea Culpa, Twitter CEO Promises a War on Trolls

Twitter has been losing precious users to the abuse of trolls for years, and now CEO Dick Costolo says he’s not going to take it anymore.

 

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has acknowledged that they haven’t done enough to address trolls and abuse – but what can Twitter actually do about it?
Screenshot 2015-02-05 15.56.56
President Obama’s cybersecurity advisor, Michael Daniel, has called the attack on Anthem, the US’s second largest health insurer, “quite concerning,” reports Reuters. Speaking at a seminar organized by Bloomberg Government, he said:
propublica.org – Julia Angwin – Feb 5 – The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.
BuzzFeed – Mat Honan – In an interview with BuzzFeed News following Twitter’s earnings call today, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo elaborated on how it intends to fight abuse and harassment on its service. Yesterday, a leaked memo Costolo sent to the entire company made its way
Google EU 2

An advisory council, formed by Google, has backed its decision to apply Europe’s ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling only in the European Union. Regulators had previously called on the company to apply the rule globally. Google put together the eight-person committee in May last year to advise it on implementing the EU court decision. It’s comprised of academics and thinkers including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. They say they weren’t paid beyond expenses and have signed no contractual or non-disclosure agreements with the company. The original ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling instructed search engines to remove personal information unless it’s judged to…


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