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Truthy is a research project that helps you understand how memes spread online. We collect tweets from Twitter and analyze them. With our statistics, images, movies, and interactive data, you can explore these dynamic networks.
Our first application was the study of astroturf campaigns in elections. Currently, we're extending our focus to several themes. Browse the collection on the Memes page. Check out the Movie tool to browse and create animations of meme networks.
Information on the web can help us catch terrorists and criminals and it can also identify a practice called astroturfing — creating the false impression that there's huge grassroots support for some cause or person using false user accounts. It's a big problem in elections and other types of political conflicts.
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We spoke to Hsinchun Chen from the University of Arizona, who is involved with the dark web terrorism research project which develops automated tools to collect and analyse terrorist content from the Internet. We also spoke to Fillipo Menzcer from Indiana University about Truthy, a free tool for analysing how information spreads on Twitter that has been useful in spotting astroturfing.
it just annoys me when people talk about the fattening foods they eat and are like “I’M SUCH A FAT KID. I’M AN OBESE PERSON.” Because it’s like, hi, you’re not. You’re the opposite. Imagine if someone who was morbidly obese did tweet about their ice cream sundae and say something like, “I’m SUCH a fat kid.” There would be crickets on the Internet. A tumbleweed would run through their Twitter. For someone who’s fat, their relationship with food is more private and shame-based. But if you’re thin, you can flaunt it without judgement.
I guess, at the end of the day, I’m just bewildered by skinny people eating like they’re Kirstie Alley (circa last year) at an all-you-can-eat ice cream bar. WTF? Maybe I’m just jealous though. Either way, just stop calling yourself fat and posting pics of you devouring cake please. Some of us can’t have our cake and Twitpic it too!
Google Facebook and Twitter now all have similar products. But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (somewhat inadvertently) made it clear yesterday that while all three have social networking features and make money from ads, they are in fundamentally different businesses.
At a very basic level, Google+ and Facebook are in the identity delivery business, and Twitter is in the information delivery business. That's a powerful distinction. It reflects a fundamentally different conception of what's more valuable: information or identity. It also gets at who is more valuable, advertisers or users.
Twitter is
being used increasingly as a means of continuing and extending
dialogue, commentary and networking amongst academic
conference participants and is rapidly becoming the default
technology used to support what is known as the ‘backchannel’.
By law, neither Facebook nor the government is obliged to inform a user when an account is subject to a search by law enforcement, though prosecutors are required to disclose material evidence to a defendant.
Twitter and several other social-media sites have formally adopted a policy to notify users when law enforcement asks to search their profile.
Last January, Twitter successfully challenged a gag order imposed by a federal judge that forbade them from informing users that the government had demanded their data.
Twitter said in an email message that its policy was "to help users protect their rights." The Facebook spokesperson would not say whether the company had a similar policy to notify users or if it was considering adopting one. REUTERS
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make it easier for users to define their relationships with other users—such as by labeling those who are real friends, as opposed to those who are just "fans." And there will be special services, like "personal assistants," to help the site's most influential users with technical questions.
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Social-networking sites have taken off in much of the world, with users across the globe becoming increasingly interconnected. But unlike many other markets, China—which has more than 450 million Internet users, more than any other country—isn't dominated by big U.S. companies like Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. In fact, China's government blocks access to those two sites for users inside the country. MySpace China, an affiliate of the U.S. social-networking site that is partly owned by News Corp., has struggled. News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.
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Hashtags, words or phrases preceded by the # symbol, have been popularized on Twitter as a way for users to organize and search messages.
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hashtags have transcended the 140-characters-or-less microblogging platform, and have become a new cultural shorthand, finding their way into chat windows, e-mail and face-to-face conversations.
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people began using hashtags to add humor, context and interior monologues to their messages — and everyday conversation. As Susan Orlean wrote in a New Yorker blog post titled “Hash,” the symbol can be “a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they’re joking.”
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Extensive efforts were expended over the weekend to comb through Sarah Palin’s e-mails from her time as the governor of Alaska. Ms. Palin may have thought that she was just chatting with her staff and friends, but now every comma, every aside, every random thought is being picked apart for meaning.
There may have been some legitimate news buried in the trove of e-mails, and she remains a person of significant public interest. So the press response makes sense, but she could not be blamed for feeling that she was under attack from a horde of biting ants.
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“A lot of those e-mails obviously weren’t meant for public consumption,” she told Chris Wallace of Fox News, where she is a source, a commentator and a subject, all wrapped into one.
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She is of interest not because of what she did as governor but because she has almost perfected the modern hybrid of politician and celebrity: once your daughter appears on “Dancing With the Stars,” your celebrity is far more important that your position on off-shore drilling. That means that all those e-mails are destined for public consumption whether she likes it or not.
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This demo is the result of a study that was carried at the Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory at the University of Trento in Italy. We looked at the daily patterns of life in Twitter messages (tweets), and we present the differences in the contents of tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day.
HOW?
We analyzed millions of tweets collected by researchers from the University of Edinburgh between November 2009 and February 2010. For gender differences, we separated the tweets into two subsets as male and female tweets by using the first names of the Twitter users. For hourly differences, we grouped the tweets according to the time of the day they were posted (in each user's local time).
In the gender differences section, you can see which phrases are used more often by males or females. These results are given under the "Compare" tab.
We also looked at the co-occurrence statistics of phrases, seperately for the two genders. That allows us to take a phrase like "cup" and see what else males (or females) talk about they mention "cup" in their tweets in a distinctive fashion (with respect to the other gender). These results are given under the "Detailed Query" tab.
In the hourly differences section, you can see how the frequency of mentionings of a given phrase change over time during the day.
Men and women are different. You know that. But do they tweet differently? Tweetolife is a simple application that lets you compare and contrast what men and women tweet about. Simply type in a search term or phrase and compare. For example, search for love, and 63 percent of tweets that contain that word were from women, based on the sample data collected between November 2009 and February 2010.
French broadcasters who want to encourage viewer interaction via Facebook or Twitter accounts can no longer do so. The “follow us on Twitter” or “Like us on Facebook” refrains — common parlance in American broadcasting — are no longer allowed on French channels. The networks can still say “find us on social networks,” but services cannot be mentioned by name.
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The regulatory decree was issued on May 27. The rationale behind the decision? Apparently mentioning social networks like Twitter or Facebook by name goes against a 1992 decree prohibiting surreptitious advertising. Encouraging users to engage with the content creators or give their own feedback is “clandestine advertising” for the social networks themselves.
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Christine Kelly, a spokesperson for the CSA, tried to explain the decision by saying it “would be a distortion of competition” to “give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition.”
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Twitter didn’t bust an injunction just for the hell of it. It pointed to a need for greater transparency. The medium is the message. Those in power can’t afford to not know how this works.
What is more arrogant: to think you can ignore a huge part of the culture? Or to think someone out there might be interested in what you had for lunch? Those who think that’s all the net or Twitter are about are indeed twits.
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doing everything online cuts off whole communities of folk with no internet access, but I watch my kids and I see that the radical changes are not about to happen. They have happened.
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This is not just about Press freedom: our whole notion of privacy changed when mobile phones took off. The way we relate to each other in public space is policed by CCTV when it’s bad and captured on phones when it’s good.
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Twitter has been forced to hand over the personal details of a British user in a libel battle that could have huge implications for free speech on the web.
The social network has passed the name, email address and telephone number of a south Tyneside councillor accused of libelling the local authority via a series of anonymous Twitter accounts. South Tyneside council took the legal fight to the superior court of California, which ordered Twitter, based in San Francisco, to hand over the user's private details.
It is believed to be the first time Twitter has bowed to legal pressure to identify anonymous users and comes amid a huge row over privacy and free speech online.
Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer named as being the plaintiff in a gagging order preventing reporting of an alleged affair with a reality TV model, is separately attempting to unmask Twitter users accused of revealing details of the privacy injunction.
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Giggs brought the lawsuit at the high court in London and the move to use California courts is likely to be seen as a landmark moment in the internet privacy battle.
Ahmed Khan, the south Tyneside councillor accused of being the author of the pseudonymous Twitter accounts, described the council's move as "Orwellian". Khan received an email from Twitter earlier this month informing him that the site had handed over his personal information. He denies being the author of the allegedly defamatory material.
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Khan said the information Twitter handed over was "just a great long list of numbers". The subpeona ordered Twitter to hand over 30 pieces of information relating to several Twitter accounts, including @fatcouncillor and @ahmedkhan01.
"I don't fully understand it but it all relates to my Twitter account and it not only breaches my human rights, but it potentially breaches the human rights of anyone who has ever sent me a message on Twitter.
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Will celebrities now have to sue Twitter and other social network sites to keep details of their sex lives private? That is exactly what one famous soccer player here is threatening to do. This well-known athlete, who is married, obtained an injunction to block his name from being used in connection with an alleged affair with the model Imogen Thomas. Her name has appeared publicly but not his.
His name is all over Twitter, and now he is threatening to sue the social network. But Twitter is located in California. If the football player sues there ... well, no California law would protect his name not appearing on the court documents as the plaintiff.
Yet it’s the offline interaction — the group lunches, the whiteboard brainstorming sessions, the Friday beer parties — that puts Studiomates at the forefront of an innovative new model for doing business.
It turns out that 140 characters in a Twitter post cannot compete with 26 characters in a Brooklyn loft.
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Five years ago, a group like Studiomates probably wouldn’t have been a group at all but rather two dozen strangers in search of a Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks.
The 26 members, who each pay $500 a month for a desk, are mostly engaged in independent projects in unrelated fields, and have no practical reason to work together. But as the new media pundit Clay Shirky said at the South by Southwest conference in March, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”
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“Sure, we could all be home doing what we do, but why would we?” Tina Roth Eisenberg (a k a swissmiss) said as her studio mates clacked away at their MacBooks. “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.”
Studiomates is an especially information-oriented bunch, and an influential one, too. In addition to her swissmiss blog and Twitter following of 200,000, Ms. Eisenberg is the founder of Creative Mornings, a popular monthly speaking series that has young designers in four cities talking.
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Comedian Stephen Fry has said he is "prepared to go to prison" over the "Twitter joke" trial.
Fry was at a benefit gig for a man who is appealing against his conviction for sending a menacing communication.
Paul Chambers had tweeted: "Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"
Fry argued that Chambers' tweet was an example of Britain's tradition of self-deprecating humour and banter.
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Chambers' case has become a cause celebre on Twitter, with hundreds of people reposting his original comments in protest at the conviction.
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Speaking generally about the internet and freedom of speech, Linehan told the audience: "We've got this incredible tool and we should fight any attempt to take it out of our hands."
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Over the past several years, Twitter has undeniably transformed media and pop culture, and it's given me new personal connections and endless fodder for the trend-tracking columns I do twice a week at AdAge.com. It has, in many ways, become the pulse of pop-culture -- and when something terrible happens in the world, like the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, it can serve as a gathering place for expressing compassion and sharing grief.
But because I'm so immersed in the Twittersphere, I get an almost toxic level of exposure to Twitter at its worst. Basically, Twitter at its worst throws random bits of information in its users' faces with great velocity and insistence, but absolutely no context, causing no end of confusion and consternation.
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Over the past several years, Twitter has undeniably transformed media and pop culture, and it's given me new personal connections and endless fodder for the trend-tracking columns I do twice a week at AdAge.com. It has, in many ways, become the pulse of pop-culture -- and when something terrible happens in the world, like the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, it can serve as a gathering place for expressing compassion and sharing grief.
But because I'm so immersed in the Twittersphere, I get an almost toxic level of exposure to Twitter at its worst. Basically, Twitter at its worst throws random bits of information in its users' faces with great velocity and insistence, but absolutely no context, causing no end of confusion and consternation.
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Case in point: The recent Jackie Chan death hoax, in which the phrase "RIP Jackie Chan" appeared for days on Twitter's Trending Topics list -- a list which, Twitter tells us, shows topics that are surging on Twitter, as opposed to topics that are continuously popular. Some duped Twitter users initially expressed sadness over the action-flick actor's untimely demise, but debunkers also immediately chimed in, along with bandwagon-hopping spammers (who included "RIP Jackie Chan" in their tweets to get people to click on links), retweeters of the debunkers -- and then, most annoyingly, people expressing their annoyance that "RIP Jackie Chan" would not stop trending.
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