Very early this morning, a man with a better chance of becoming President of the United States than I have of putting on pants in the morning instructed us all to (check out sex tape). Luckily for people who don’t want to engage with his comments on an intellectual level, Twitter is there for your regularly scheduled dose of comedy.
As anyone who has followed Donald Trump’s unprecedented and unlikely run for the Oval Office, the man who popularized the phrase “You’re Fired!” certainly has a way with words. Now no one would ever mistake Trump for a wordsmith, but when it comes to insulting people or summarizing complex topics into vague and curiously aggressive soundbites, there’s uniquely Trump vernacular that we’ve never before seen in a Presidential race.
With this as a jumping off point, the hashtag “#TrumpExplainsMoviePlots” emerged out of nowhere this week and quickly became a trending topic on Twitter. Suffice it to say, the tweets that the hashtag created are nothing short of comedic gold. To help save you some time, and to provide a few hearty laughs on a lazy Friday, we’ve combed through some of the most outrageously clever and hilarious tweets that perfectly capture what Donald Trump would sound like if forced to review movies on Twitter.
Twitter has been criticised for years for its failure to police the network. From accounts promoting terrorism to out-of-control abuse of users, the site has an awful reputation for controlling the worst parts of the internet.
Today, the site confirmed two big changes that it’s making to combat terrorism and abuse respectively. According to the New York Times, Twitter has been on a crusade against accounts that promoted terrorism, suspending 235,000 terrorist-related accounts in the last six months. The site is also speeding up its review process and making it harder for banned users to get back onto the platform.
When it comes to the internet, there are few things more frightening than finding out that one of your social media accounts has been compromised. Our Facebook accounts in particular are home to countless private details and conversations, which is exactly why we should be diligent about checking the status of our accounts on a regular basis, even if there are no signs of tampering.
Twitter is acutely aware that it’s no longer the hip social network of choice for tweens. (Was it ever the hip network of choice for anyone?) In a bid to become cool again, and also boost its stock price, the network has been rolling out changes over the past couple months. The latest comes straight from Snapchat’s playbook.
Starting sometime in the next few weeks, Twitter’s app will have #Stickers that you can plaster over your photos. Make no mistake: these aren’t the the same kind of stickers that Facebook and Snapchat and Kim Kardashian have been touting for years: these are, per the press release, #Stickers and therefore definitely new and interesting and better.
This is what Twitter has been missing all this time. This is the solution. Stickers and slightly longer tweets will finally Make Twitter Great Again.
Welcome to the internet age, where hackers are getting smarter every day and malware is lurking around every corner. We’ve seen a terrifying amount of big data breaches occur over the past few years, and each one seems bigger and scarier than the last. Today, however, we get a new reminder that data breaches are just one of the ways hackers get their hands on our data. Reports are flying that tens of millions of valid Twitter account credentials have been made available for sale on the dark web, though the company has denied that a breach took place.
Whatever the case, the most important takeaway is this: Change your Twitter password immediately. More →
Twitter has been fighting for relevancy over the last few years: Snapchat took away its tweens, Facebook took away the argumentative uncles, and Twitter is mostly left with political statements and Kanye’s tweetstorms.
But don’t worry, there’s a plan to Make Twitter Great Again, and it involves changes to the very heart of Twitter’s formula, the 140-character limit.
After years of deliberation, it appears that Twitter is finally going to stop counting links and photos toward its 140-character limit in tweets. A person familiar with the matter tells Bloomberg that although it hasn’t been made public, the company has reached a decision, and the update could hit within the next two weeks.
With a drunk text, you always run the risk of embarrassing yourself in the eyes of whoever is on the receiving end of the message. But with a drunk tweet, you run the risk of embarrassing yourself to an untold number of followers. Worse yet, if a drunk tweet of yours goes viral, well, you may be forever associated with an ill-conceived message resulting from a long night spent out on the town.
From a number of different angles, Twitter seems to be plagued by problems. Not only is the company having a tough time attracting new users, but it’s also performing poorly on the financial side. Indeed, shares of Twitter are now trading in the $16 range, representing an all-time low.
In an effort to help inject a bit of life into the social networking service, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey earlier this year floated the idea that Twitter might increase the 140 character limit that has defined the site since its inception. While seemingly outrageous, Dorsey teased the idea of supporting tweets with as many as 10,000 characters. More →
Last month, following what seemed like years of speculation, Twitter finally launched its new algorithmic feed. It was turned off by default, but that didn’t stop a huge bloc of users from immediately expressing their outrage.
It might have been a premature reaction, but starting this week, many users have begun to realize that their feeds are showing them “the best tweets first,” indicating that the feature has switched on across the entire network.
More →
Soon after learning that Apple had the audacity to challenge the FBI in courts over the iPhone that was used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, Donald Trump blasted the iPhone maker and called for an Apple boycott. He did so minutes after tweeting something from an iPhone.
The often-annoying and doughy Republican candidate then said he owns both an iPhone and a Samsung phone and that he would use the Android device until Apple gives into the FBI’s demands.
Three weeks later, the Donald is back at tweeting from an iPhone. Like hundreds of millions of users, he probably just can’t stay away from the handset. More →
