Tag: Twitter
Don’t Join Threads—Make Instagram’s ‘Twitter Killer’ Join You
Meta’s Twitter alternative promises that it will work with decentralized platforms, giving you greater control of your data. You can hold the company to that—if you don’t sign up.
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Ron DeSantis Pushed Elon Musk’s Twitter to Its Breaking Point
Launching his White House bid on the social network revealed the technical and political limitations of Musk’s platform.
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Twitter Is No Longer a Creative Haven
Elon Musk’s changes have been most destabilizing to the very people who made the platform’s unique culture.
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Mastodon Features That Twitter Should Steal (but Won’t)
Elon Musk’s platform could learn a thing or two from its most popular alternative—like how to build a social platform people actually want to be on.
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Here’s How Bad a Twitter Mega-Breach Would Be
Elon Musk laid off half the staff, and mass resignations seem likely. If nobody’s there to protect the fort, what’s the worst that could happen?
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How to ‘Quiet Quit’ Elon Musk’s Twitter
The chaos engulfing the platform provides an opportunity to reclaim control of your online life, without logging off for good.
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Twitter Users Flock to Other Platforms as the Elon Musk Era Begins
Discord, Mastodon and other services are bustling as Twitter fans make backup plans for their online social lives.
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Twitter now in compliance with India’s new IT rules, government says
Twitter is now complying with India’s new IT rules, New Delhi told a court Tuesday, in a move that is expected to ease months-long tension between the American social media network and the government of the key overseas market.
A lawyer representing the Indian government told the Delhi High Court that Twitter’s recent steps — appointment of chief compliance officer, nodal contact person and resident grievance officer in the country — have made the social network “prima facie” compliant with the new law.
A Twitter spokesperson in India didn’t immediately return a text.
India’s new IT rules, which were unveiled in February this year, mandates significant social media firms, among other things, to appoint officials to address on-ground concerns in the country.
Facebook and Google complied with this requirement in May, when the proposed rules went into effect in the South Asian market.
Twitter, which was facing heat from the Indian government for not blocking some tweets that the Indian government had deemed objectionable, had requested additional few months to comply with the new rules and in the meantime filled the required roles with temporary staff.
Tension has been brewing between the two for several months. Twitter labeled a tweet from Sambit Patra, the spokesperson of India’s ruling party BJP, in May as “manipulated media.” Days later, a special squad of Delhi police that investigates terrorism and other crimes made a surprise visit to two of Twitter’s offices in the country to seek information about Twitter’s rationale to term Patra’s tweets as manipulated.
Twitter at the time said it was “concerned by recent events regarding our employees in India and the potential threat to freedom of expression for the people we serve.”
The firm’s slow-efforts to comply with the new IT rules had cost the firm liability protection in the country last month, the Indian government said earlier. Separately, it warned Twitter that the firm was in “total noncompliance” with the law.
Internet services enjoy what is broadly referred to as “safe harbor” protection that say that tech platforms won’t be held liable for the things their users post or share online.
Twitter also received public criticism from several top Indian ministers.
“All social media platforms are welcome to do business in India. They can criticize Ravi Shankar Prasad, my Prime Minister or anyone. The issue is of misuse of social media. Some of them say we are bound by American laws. You operate in India, make good money, but you will take the position that you’ll be governed by American laws. This is plainly not acceptable,” Prasad, who was the IT minister of India until resigning from the position last month, said at a virtual conference early July.
The new rules also require significant social media firms operating encrypted messaging services to devise a way to trace originator of messages for special cases. Several firms including Facebook’s WhatsApp and Signal have not complied with this requirement. WhatsApp has sued the Indian government over this requirement.
Twitter Spaces now let you invite co-hosts
Fleets weren’t long for this world, but Twitter’s product teams aren’t slowing down on bringing new stuff to Spaces, the company’s own take on audio rooms. Twitter introduced Spaces in a limited test last year, expanding the Clubhouse copycat feature more broadly to anyone with at least 600 followers in May.
Now, Twitter is giving Space hosts the ability to add two co-hosts, who they can rope in through an invite system. Spaces will allow one main host, two additional co-hosts and up to 10 speakers. Additional co-hosts will make the task of moderation much more manageable, as they’ll be able to vet speaker requests, tap speakers and give anyone in the Space the boot.
With Fleets out of the picture, Twitter’s Spaces are the only feature for now that lives above the main feed in the Twitter app. That virtual real estate, which has echoes of Instagram’s Stories, draws the eye to anything that a social network wants its users to check out first. Twitter also began rolling out a dedicated tab to make it easier to discover Spaces, surfacing live audio rooms in real time in a central location.
A number of major apps spliced live audio chat rooms into their platforms in light of Clubhouse’s breakout run. In June, Spotify launched Greenroom, a standalone app that allows people to create 1,000-person voice events. Naturally, Facebook also launched its own spin on live audio rooms (called Live Audio Rooms) in June. Discord, already a leader in voice-based chat, added its own Clubhouse-like event channels in March. Twitter followed the same trend with Spaces, but unlike with Fleets, it looks like the company plans to continue supporting the relatively new feature.