Tag: twitter

Twitter is going through a transition period

Twitter has been able to create a lot of buzzes lately. It has a new owner now, named Elon Musk. This change has taken place after several ifs and buts. But a decision has been made.

Now, if we take a look at the previous actions related to this matter. Then we can safely conclude that there have been various changes to the multimillion-dollar deal. At first, it was declared that Musk will buy the company. But later on, he demanded to disclose the number of fake accounts. Then it was declared that he was cancelling the deal. After that, Twitter did question the fact that someone cannot cancel a deal after having a look at some confidential data.

So now the $44 million deal is done. It also avoids Elon Musk from facing a court case, which Twitter was planning to put against the famous billionaire. As a result of the deal, several top executives have been removed from their places. There have also been layoffs to reduce the number of employees.

Now, when it comes to Twitter as a platform, then there will be some changes to the social media platform. The first one is the fact that the blue tick will now cost $8 for a month. So, this is the beginning of a new future for Twitter.

Now, there are also speculations that Elon Musk will be making a lot of changes within the Twitter platform. Some of them can be seen on the official Twitter account of the famous billionaire. All of these changes will be seen shortly.

https://unsplash.com/photos/cJDwJ4X2IrQ

https://unsplash.com/photos/cJDwJ4X2IrQ

Among all this, there have been various speculations that the employees of Twitter are going to sue it for the mass firing act. To remove the spotlight from the mass layoff, there are also complaints from Elon Musk that the advertisers are fleeing the platform.

There is also speculation by Twitter users that there will now be strict rules and regulations that will shape a different future for Twitter. All of these also point out that Elon Musk is desperately waiting for Twitter to start making money.

After the layoffs, Jack Dorsey has also taken the responsibility for the layoffs. The layoffs have come as a setback for several employees. But there is also speculation that after the layoffs, some employees are being requested to come back.

This layoff has mainly affected India. The maximum workforce of the company has been fired in India, and now very few have been retained.  

All of these events have given very bold and harsh indications to the entire world. As Elon Musk is the CEO, so he will now be taking a lot of steps towards changing the company. The steps will bring about some more surprises, as has been depicted by the above incidents. But the effects will also be there. The recent rapid steps have not been accepted positively by the public. So, it remains to be seen, what more will make the headlines for the social networking site. After all this, the future is exciting for Twitter. 

History of twitter

Twitter is an American social networking and microblogging service. Twitter users interact with small messages called, “tweets”. Currently twitter has more than 330 million monthly active users. It is in the league of big social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc. It was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Even Williams in March. In this article I will take you through the journey of creation and rise of twitter.

Initial history

In 2006, Jack was an undergraduate student at New York University. He came up with an idea of an SMS service to communicate with small group. He shared his idea with board members of a podcasting members Odeo. Williams was also part of board members. He later ascribed the idea to Noah. They decided to name this project twttr as domain twitter.com was already in use. Later they bought the domain name and changed the name of service to twitter. Twitter spun off its own company in 2007.

Work on the project started on March 21, 2006 and full version was publicly in july 2006.

The first breakthrough moment for twitter came in 2007 through South by Southwest Interactive conference. During the event, twitter engagement increased from 20000 tweets par day to 60000. They placed two 60 inch plasma screens in the conference hallways. These screens were used to stream twitter messages.

This conference helped twitter in rapid initial growth. Almost 400k tweets were being posted on twitter per quarter in 2007. This increased to 100 million tweet per quarter in 2008. By 2010, company recorded over 70000 registered applications. In march 2021 it became third highest ranking social site. Prominent events like football world cup, NBA finals etc. helped twitter in growing quickly. When Michael Jackson died on 25th June 2009, twitter severs crashed as users were tweeting at the rate 100k tweets per hour.

Emergence of “New Twitter”

After gaining popularity, twitter started revamping it’s service. Initial changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving twitter by clicking on link given in individual tweets of various sites like YouTube.

On 5 April 2011 , twitter released a new home page but due to some glitch it was relaunched on 20th April 2011. On 8th December 2011, twitter added a new feature to its website named “FLY”. In addition to home tab, the connect and discover were also introduced. On 21 March 2012, twitter celebrated its birthday and also announced that they have 140 million active users.

In 2012 twitter expanded at a fast rate. They opened an office in Detroit to work with automobile brands. In june 2012, logo of twitter was modified to bird symbol. Throughout next couple of years twitter acquired several companies like Vine, Crashlytics, Trendrr etc.

In 2014, twitter underwent a redesign which significantly changes its interface. Some of major changes included profile picture and biography in a column left to the timeline, and a full-width header image. Twitter acquired many different type of companies onwards 2014 like Namo Media ( a native advertising company) in 2014, Mitro( a password-security startup) on 31st july 2014, Niche(an advertising network) on February 2015 etc.

Twitter took an significant step in 2020 and started marking tweets which contain misleading information.

Twitter kept expanding its business and was announced to be the 10th most downloaded mobile app in 2019.

Afghanistan-Taliban Crisis for Social Media giants

The Taliban’s fast takeover of Afghanistan postures a unused challenge for huge US tech companies on dealing with substance made by a bunch considered to be fear mongers by a few world governments.

Social media monster Facebook affirmed on Monday that it assigns the Taliban a fear based oppressor bunch and bans it and substance supporting it from its platforms. But Taliban individuals have allegedly kept on utilize Facebook’s end-to-end scrambled informing benefit WhatsApp to communicate straightforwardly with Afghanis in spite of the company forbidding it beneath rules against unsafe associations.

A Facebook representative said the company was closely observing the circumstance within the nation which WhatsApp would take activity on any accounts found to be connected with endorsed associations in Afghanistan, which might incorporate account removal. On Twitter, Taliban representatives with hundreds of thousands of supporters have tweeted overhauls amid the country’s takeover. Asked around the Taliban’s utilize of the stage, the company pointed to its approaches against rough associations and derisive conduct but did not reply Reuters questions almost how it makes its classifications. Twitter’s rules say it does not permit bunches who advance fear mongering or savagery against civilians.

The Taliban’s return has raised fears it’ll split down on opportunity of discourse and human rights, especially women’s rights, which the nation may ended up a sanctuary once once more for worldwide terrorism. Taliban authorities have issued articulations saying they need tranquil worldwide relations and have guaranteed to secure Afghans. Major social media firms this year made high-profile choices on dealing with sitting world pioneers and bunches in power. These incorporate disputable pieces of previous US President Donald Trump for affecting savagery around the January 6 Capitol revolt and bans on Myanmar’s military in the midst of a upset within the country. Facebook, which was long scrutinized for coming up short to combat abhor discourse in Myanmar, said the overthrow raised dangers of offline hurt and its history of human rights infringement contributed to the boycott on the administering military or Tatmadaw.

The companies, which have come beneath fire from worldwide officials and controllers for their outsized political and financial impact, frequently depend on state assignments or official worldwide acknowledgments to decide who is permitted on their sites. These too offer assistance decide who can be confirmed, permitted official state accounts or may get uncommon treatment for rule-breaking discourse due to newsworthiness or open intrigued loopholes. However, the contrasts among the tech companies’ positions propose the approach isn’t uniform. Alphabet’s YouTube, inquired whether it contains a boycott or limitations on the Taliban, declined to comment but said the video-sharing benefit depends on governments to characterize “Outside Fear based oppressor Organizations” (FTO) to direct the site’s requirement of its rules against savage criminal bunches

YouTube pointed to the US State Department’s list of FTO’s of which the Taliban isn’t a part. The US instep classifies the Taliban as a “Extraordinarily Assigned Worldwide Fear monger,” which solidifies the US resources of those boycotted and bars Americans from working with them. Complicating things encourage, in spite of the fact that most nations appear small sign they will perceive the gather carefully, the Taliban’s position on the world arrange may however move as they cement control. “The Taliban is to some degree an acknowledged player at an worldwide relations level,” said Mohammed Sinan Siyech, a analyst on security in South Asia and doctoral candidate at the College of Edinburgh, indicating to talks China and the Joined together States have held with the group. “If that acknowledgment comes in, at that point for a company like Twitter or Facebook to create a subjective decision that this gather is awful and we’ll not have them postures complications.

Twitter Testing to Flag ‘Misleading’ Content

Twitter on Tuesday declared a modern highlight to permit clients to hail substance that may contain deception, a flay that has as it were developed amid the pandemic. “We’re testing a highlight for you to report Tweets that appear deluding – as you see them,” the social arrange said from its security and security account.

Starting Tuesday, a button would be obvious to a few clients from the Joined together States, South Korea, and Australia to select “it’s deluding” after clicking “report tweet.” Users can at that point be more particular, hailing the deceiving tweet as possibly containing deception around “wellbeing,” “legislative issues” and “other.”

“We’re surveying on the off chance that typically an viable approach so we’re beginning little,” the San Francisco-based company said. “We may not take activity on and cannot react to each report within the experiment, but your input will offer assistance us recognize patterns so that we will move forward the speed and scale of our broader deception work.” Twitter, like Facebook and YouTube, frequently comes.

But the stage does not have the assets of its Silicon Valley neighbors, and so regularly depends on exploratory strategies that are less costly than selecting armed forces of moderators. Such endeavors have inclined up as Twitter toughened its deception rules amid the COVID-19 widespread and amid the US presidential decision between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

For case, Twitter started blocking clients in Walk who have been cautioned five times almost spreading wrong data almost vaccines. And the organize started hailing tweets from Trump with a pennant caution of their deluding substance amid his 2020 re-election campaign, some time recently the then-president was at long last prohibited from the site for posting actuations to viciousness and messages undermining the race results. Moderators are eventually dependable for deciding which substance really damages Twitter’s terms of utilize, but the arrange has said it trusts to inevitably utilize a framework that depends on both human and mechanized ana

Twitter will pay hackers to discover biases in its automated picture cropping after being accused of doing so.

Twitter is running a competition in the hopes of finding biases in its picture cropping algorithm, and the best teams will get cash awards (via Engadget). Twitter hopes that by allowing teams access to its code and picture cropping model, they will be able to identify ways in which the algorithm might be detrimental (for example, cropping in a way that stereotypes or erases the image’s topic).


Those that compete must submit a summary of their results as well as a dataset that can be put through the algorithm to show the problem. Twitter will then give points depending on the kind of damages discovered, the potential impact on people, and other factors.


The winner team will get $3,500, with $1,000 awards granted for the most creative and generalizable results. On Twitter, that figure has sparked some debate, with some people arguing that it should include an extra zero. For example, if you discovered a bug that allowed you to execute activities for someone else (such retweeting a tweet or picture) via cross-site scripting, Twitter’s standard bug bounty programme would pay you $2,940. You’d make $7,700 if you could find an OAuth flaw that allowed you to take over someone’s Twitter account.


Twitter had already conducted its own study into its image-cropping algorithm, publishing a paper in May that looked at how the system was biassed in the wake of claims that its preview crops were racist. Since then, Twitter has mainly abandoned algorithmically trimming previews, but it is still utilised on desktop, and a good cropping algorithm is a useful tool for a firm like Twitter.


Opening a competition allows Twitter to receive input from a much wider group of people. For example, the Twitter team had a meeting to discuss the competition, during which a team member stated that they were getting queries about caste-based biases in the algorithm, something that software developers in California may not be aware of.
Twitter is also searching for more than simply unintentional algorithmic bias. Both deliberate and unintended damages have point values on the scale. Unintentional harms are cropping behaviours that may be abused by someone publishing maliciously created photos, according to Twitter. Intentional harms are cropping behaviours that could be exploited by someone posting maliciously intended images.


The competition, according to Twitter’s announcement blog, is distinct from its bug bounty programme; if you submit a complaint regarding algorithmic biases to Twitter outside of the competition, your report will be closed and tagged as not applicable, the company warns. If you’re interested in participating, visit the competition’s HackerOne page to learn more about the rules, qualifications, and other details. Submissions are open until August 6th at 11:59 p.m. PT, and the challenge winners will be revealed on August 9th at the Def Con AI Village.

Government vs Twitter

Chris pirillo said that “twitter is a great place to tell the world what you are thinking before you have had a chance to think about it”. However, the government wants to control it. 

India’s Covid-19 rise had eclipsed all superlatives only a few months ago. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of India’s worst public-health catastrophe in history, which has highlighted the country’s deteriorating healthcare infrastructure. In the midst of the tragedy, while armies of medical personnel and volunteers focused their energies on battling the virus, the administration looked to be concentrating on a different issue. And that issue is TWITTER.

 The initial root of the situation was a tweet sent by BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra on May 18. Patra displayed a paper he referred to as a “toolkit” in this tweet, which appears to be an internal Congress document outlining the processes for undermining the BJP’s reaction to the epidemic and increasing publicity of the party’s activities. Days later, the Delhi Police, which reports to the Union government but is not a full-fledged state, paid a visit to Twitter’s headquarters in Delhi and Gurugram, ostensibly to find out why the company opted to put the warning label on Patra’s post. According to local sources, authorities in Uttar Pradesh recently blamed Twitter, along with journalists and opposition party officials, for posting a video that sparked communal strife. The video, which alleged to depict majority Hindus beating a minority Muslim guy, prompted another complaint against Twitter India CEO Manish Maheshwari, according to Delhi police. However, The problematic footage has subsequently been deleted, with no more comment from the firm other than a remark about following local regulations. 

The government has opted to focus on digital image management many times during the epidemic, including the most recent occurrences. Following government demands, Twitter and Facebook pulled down about 100 postings in April. The government’s approach to the epidemic was criticized in several of these tweets.Following the agricultural demonstrations, Twitter agreed to the BJP’s demands to temporarily and permanently restrict 500 accounts, including those of opposition leaders and journalists. The government also forced Twitter to remove several well-known personalities who expressed support for the protestors, like Punjabi musician JazzyB, whose account has 1.2 million followers but can’t be viewed from India, though the firm hasn’t followed through on all of its demands.

Therefore, they not only silence the critical voices but also exposes the corporation to much more pressure to stifle government critics in India and elsewhere. Twitter, a relative newcomer with 17.5 million members, has India as one of its fastest-growing markets. However, its limited reach makes it vulnerable in a country that demonstrated its willingness to outlaw popular foreign services a year ago when it banned TikTok — which had 200 million users in the country — WeChat, and hundreds of other Chinese-made apps following a violent clash on the disputed border. It is critical to political debate in India, and Modi himself is a frequent user with a following of over 69 million people, demonstrating its global reach. While politicians have been outspoken in their criticism of Twitter, none have publicly threatened to abolish it. 

India is pressuring Twitter with requests for user data and content removal.

This year, Twitter is under a lot of pressure in India. However, even before the country imposed stringent new regulations on tech firms, the corporation was bombarded with requests from the government to delete material or disclose user data.

Indian authorities requested more account information from Twitter in the final six months of 2020 than any other nation, according to the Silicon Valley-based company’s newest transparency report released on Wednesday. The number of requests for content removal submitted by India increased by 152% to over 7,000.

https://videopress.com/v/y9N6TmxZ?preloadContent=metadata
This journalist explains why one of her tweets vanished.

India’s demands for user information amounted to 25% of the total it received during the reporting period, which runs from July 1 to December 31, 2020, according to Twitter (TWTR). Over 99 percent of the requests were ignored by Twitter.

“Notably, this is the first time since we began releasing our transparency report in 2012 that the US is not the top worldwide requester,” the firm stated, adding that the US came in second in terms of global volume.

According to the company, the information requests comprised normal legal demands as well as emergency requests from government agencies and law enforcement authorities.

“Where appropriate, Twitter will push back on requests for account information that are incomplete or inappropriate,” according to the firm, such as those that are “invalid or overbroad in scope.” In the event of an emergency involving the risk of death or serious harm, the firm may reveal account information if sufficient proof is presented that such information will prevent the hazards.

Just over 150 information requests from India were classed as emergencies by Twitter. According to the firm, the United States sent the most such requests in the globe, with 822.

Meanwhile, legal requests from India to delete or withhold information increased by 152% in the latter six months of 2020 compared to the previous reporting period. Just over 9% of the 6,971 demands were met, according to Twitter.

After Japan, which made over 16,000 requests mostly connected to narcotics, obscenity, or money lending, India became the world’s second-highest submitter of such requests. The number of requests from Japan decreased by 16 percent from the previous quarter, but it still accounted for 43 percent of all worldwide requests.

According to the firm, 361 requests for information removal were made on 199 verified journalist and news outlet accounts throughout the world. It went on to say that India accounted for 128 of the requests.

The research excludes 2021 when Twitter is embroiled in a heated standoff with the Indian government over new information technology regulations.

During a series of farmer demonstrations in February, the business fought with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology over accounts that the agency wanted to be taken down. Some of the requests were granted, but Twitter declined to take action against accounts belonging to journalists, activists, or politicians.

Weeks after the feud, India issued new rules requiring social media companies to establish three roles in the country: a “compliance officer” who will ensure that their platforms comply with local laws, a “grievance officer” who will handle complaints from Indian users about their platforms, and a “contact person” who will be available to Indian law enforcement 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are all required to live in India. If authorities demand it, companies must track out the “first originator” of messages.

In May, the firm raised worries about “fundamental components of the new IT Rules” as well as the country’s “potential threat to freedom of speech.” It promised to fulfill the new standards a few days later.

A Delhi court recently chastised Twitter for failing to comply with the new guidelines promptly. In a court filing last week, the business stated that it had appointed an interim compliance officer. It also stated in the filing that it will “attempt in good faith to make an offer of employment to a qualified candidate” for all of the positions within eight weeks.

The company’s website featured a complaints officer and a Bangalore location where Twitter could be reached as of last weekend.

Twitter blames government for threatening free speech

Twitter started putting allegations on government for threatening free speech, Government counters it is defying Indian laws: On Thursday, amid the tensions between social media platform and government due to new guidelines, Twitter putted some serious allegations on government of “dangerous overreach that is inconsistent with open, democratic principles, ” and further also said that it is being forced to withhold portions of “legitimate free speech” over fears around the employees safety and some threats of financial penalties.

Sources are indicating that these were majorly related to the government’s request to pull down tweets related to farmer protests, as it was believed that these were peddling an anti-India sentiment and was an attempt to ruin India’s image globally and initiate some riots, as well as it is also related due to incidents during corona pandemic. The B1.617.2 variant which was initially found in India was being labelled as Indian variant in this social media platform and this was also ruining image of India globally.

A spokesperson of this giant social media platform gave an statement that, “We maintain that the content reported in the original order constitutes protected, legitimate free speech, under Indian and international law, and we have formally communicated this to the government… Yet, due to the law’s limited scope under Section 69A (of the IT Act) which gives limited room to an intermediary to defend the content, we have been compelled to withhold (block in India) in response to a non-compliance notice. Not doing so poses penal consequences with many risks for Twitter employees.“

However, the spokesperson also added and defended himself that Twitter does not take any action on any verified accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians in keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression . The statement given by him came one day after the social media platform was deemed to be non-compliant with the new social media intermediary norms under which it is now required to appoint some designated officers to deal with the grievances and compliance apart from having a mechanism for pulling down content where there are maligned individuals or there is any sexually explicit matter.

Twitter said that there were some concerns over “intimidation tactics” by police and was bit critical of the new IT rules. The big social media platform also expressed its displeasure over the new rules taking which according to them is weakening the immunity of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram over third-party content. It is making them liable for criminal and civil action.

Just after few hours of allegations imposed by Twitter on Indian government the government replied charging the company with deliberately subverting the law of the land and also trying to “dictate” its terms even while using the term “opaque policies” to “arbitrarily” suspend user accounts and delete tweets without any proper explanation. The government asked the American company to stop beating around the bush and said that “the only instance of scuttling free speech on Twitter is Twitter itself and its opaque policies, as a result of which people’s accounts are suspended and tweets deleted arbitrarily without recourse“. The government further added that “law-making and policy formulation is the sole prerogative of the sovereign and Twitter is just a social media platform, and it has no locus in dictating what should India’s legal policy framework should be” and thus slammed Twitter.

Three young individual charged in Twitter Hack last month

Twitter Inc.’s worstever hack began months earlier with a teenager on a telephone, according to an indictment filed Friday by federal authorities.

The US Department of Justice has charged three young individuals with hacking Twitter last month that compromised the accounts of 130 high profile users including Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

The three were charged in connection with the July 15 hack, including a 17-year-old juvenile whom authorities have accused of masterminding the scam.

Two teenagers and a 22-year-old were charged with hacking the Twitter Inc accounts of famous people including former President Barack Obama, billionaire Bill Gates and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, the Department of Justice said on Friday.

Mason Sheppard, a 19-year-old British man who went by the alias Chaewon, was charged with carrying out the hack, as well as related wire fraud and money laundering crimes, according to a Justice Department statement.

Orlando, Florida based Nima Fazeli, 22, nicknamed Rolex, was charged with aiding and abetting those crimes. The Justice Department did not name the third defendant, but the Hillsborough County State Attorney Office in Tampa, Florida said it had arrested 17-year-old Graham Clark.

The tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

Twitter aims to limit people from sharing articles they have not read

Twitter has nowadays created the most effective impact on connecting and sharing information. Twitter search is highly efficient in searching out active trending conversations or breaking news or things related to personal interests or even the latest news in and around anywhere on the Earth. Today if counting the number of active users of Twitter, it is found to be more than five hundred million throughout the globe. This number includes youth of this generation to the previous one, and from common men to celebrities.

  • According to the survey, it has been found that Twitter faces more than five hundred million tweets by the users per day, hence making it one of the active and widely used social networking sites. Apart from the twitter search, there’s an option for twitter advanced search which is effective only for registered users. The main advantage of this feature is the users can search out specific tweets regarding specific events and can retweet or share the contents. But it has also been found that the users used to share the articles even without reading them, which is now been aiming for restrictions of doing so.

To implement this restriction, Twitter has come up with the idea of experimenting with android users. In this experiment, Twitter is hoping to make the users exchange knowledgeable discussions only, on their respective twitter accounts. Whenever any users will try to share the articles or any other informative tweets without reading them or tapping on them, a prompt will pop up on the phone screen. This prompt will ask the user whether or not they truly want to retweet a hyperlink that they have now not tapped on. This will most probably make the user realize to tap on and read the tweet completely and then decide whether to retweet that particular article or not.

Twitter also cited in a remark which states, “Sharing or exchanging a piece of writing can easily ignite conversations, so you may additionally make a priority to desire to find out about the accurate concept earlier of you tweet it.” It has also added the statement, “To cooperate in advertising knowledgeable dialogue, we are attempting our newly developed feature recommended on Android till now- even as you retweet a piece of article that you for sure haven’t opened on your twitter account, we would perchance ask in case you would love to open it first then retweet.”

Sharing the links to pieces of writing without reading them is not at all a new trouble that has been witnessed. A study made in 2016 by the laptop computer scientists of Microsoft and Columbia University located that a total of 59 percent of the hyperlinks that had already been uploaded on Twitter is by no means of functionally tapped on for reading.

Much less academically sound, on the different hand larger telling, used to be every unique article posted that very exact year having a headline- “Seventy percent of Facebook users only examine the headline of science tales earlier than commenting.”- the faux records net website online the Science Submit has carried out a massive stock of 1,27,000 for the trouble which is almost accomplished lorem ipsum stuffed with textual content.

The solution made by Twitter is simply not to make the prohibition of such retweets, however just to needle friction into the procedure to attempt to poke some account holders to rethink their moves on the social neighborhood. It is just an approach the corporate has been taking more often not so long ago, in a try to make enhanced “platform well being” except making a deal with the censorship accusations.

In May, the corporate started testing by asking the users to amend their replies at the time they had been about to deliver tweets with “offensive language” to another fellow. The agency defined, “If at all the trouble gets an ignition, you are free to state the belongings you don’t implicit.” The corporate further added, “To assist you on reconsidering your reply, we’re walking a constrained scan on iOS with a prompt that offers you the alternative to amend your reply in enhancing it’s posted if it makes use of language which can, besides, be damaging or offensive.

That switch has been proved plenty less efficient, with the Twitter netting out, choosing as a lot of hazard-free- if the conversations full of vulgarity and filthy had been shared between friends, due to the fact, it does in truth hateful speech established on others.

“We’re attempting to encourage human beings to rethink their behavior as well as accent and revise their language earlier than posting because they usually are in the warmth of the second and they can also moreover say something they regret”, Twitter’s international head of internet website online insurance plan diagram for accepting as true with and safety referred to at the time.

Twitter has made our life easy to go with the flow of trending topics. So it is necessary to follow the guidelines made by the corporation in order to tweet and retweet the content. To create a clean impact it is important to first read the content thoroughly than to share and retweet. Finding contents can be done through the Twitter search feature but to find the most appropriate content with respective range or specifications, twitter advanced search will be the best option. It is advised to be a registered user of Twitter in order to get familiar with the day to day updates in and around the nations.

Facial recognition technology and how its affecting us.

Technology, evolving everyday getting smarter and smarter in order to ease our daily lives. One such technology is the facial recognition technology. It is the not only a hot brand on the tech market but also on the television front, it has been showcased in Tv shows and movies for years. Like any other technology it grows sophisticatedly and its usage has also expanded accordingly. These sensors have been upgraded to such a level that they can uniquely identify not just faces or animals but every individual fish that it can scans. That is the level of sophistication the facial recognition technology has achieved, but with its expanse it also brings about numerous privacy and civil liberty issues that need to be addressed. The biggest users of this technology worldwide are the Law enforcement departments. The use of this is so blatant that in an estimate around one in every two American has had their photos searched in this manner. Whenever this issue is raised not just in America but in any of the countries that this is so widely used, the authorities use the “we want to prevent atrocities” line, which would be sufficient if it did not come at the price of personal freedom.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

 Many countries have used this extensively but none other than china, the leading brand for infringing people’s right. They use a project called “Skynet” to monitor nearly every person’s movement, which includes whom you meet, where you go and even track all your movement for the past week. What makes this technology even worse is that even though it is still being used it is still a work in progress, which means its error rate is very high with only a measly 20% success rate. Even though this has such a large failure rate, nations worldwide continue to use it. Just a few years back Sri Lankan authorities mistakenly linked a Brown university student to a terrorist attack. With all of these concerns, a public domain company Clearview.ai has launched its services. To put this into perspective, Clearview.ai has collected data from nearly 3 billion images, which to this date is larger than any other facial recognition database on this planet. The founder Hoan Ton-That has scrapped photos from nearly all publicly available domains, and has become a front runner in the worst possible way. With their below the belt techniques and illegal means of acquiring photos of people, the company has also received cease-and-desist order from Facebook, YouTube and twitter this year. However, they have refused to do so and in fact even going so far as to claim that they have a first amendment right to harvest data, which is completely false. What is of a greater concern is that Hoan has previously developed apps like ViddyHo which tricked its users into sharing their emails and then spammed their contacts. Not only this but since its emergence Clearview.ai has tried to pitch itself to white supremacist candidates to ensure their victory. They have even quietly tried to offer their services to entities in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who have had a history of human rights violations. With such a large freehand to companies like Clearview.ai we seem to be headed to some dark times indeed.

What could be done to limit these companies are stringent laws to be placed so that companies are required to acquire permission from the person they are collecting data from. We individually cannot do much for this however with a comprehensive nation-wide policy some measure can be taken to ease the illegal flow of information that companies like Clearview.ai seem to obtain.

What happens next is for all of us to see.