Tag: Twitter

Twitter says finances impacted by ‘bugs;’ stock slides

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Twitter shares skidded Thursday after reporting weak growth in the past quarter resulting from glitches that made it harder to bring in advertising revenue. Profit for the third quarter was $37 million, a sharp drop from last year when Twitter was helped by a large tax benefit. Revenue rose nine percent from a year earlier to $824 million, well below analyst forecasts, impacted by what the company called “revenue product […]

Twitter lets users sideline unwanted direct messages

  SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) — Twitter on Monday said it is rolling out a filter that will hide away unwanted direct messages, providing a new tool to stymie abuse. Twitter users who receive direct messages from people they don’t follow on the platform will be able to have such missives automatically routed to a secondary folder. “Unwanted messages aren’t fun,” Twitter tweeted in August when it began testing the filter that let users […]

Twitter revamps website in bid to mimic mobile app

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) — Twitter on Monday began rolling out an overhauled version of its website, making it more similar to the mobile version of the one-to-many messaging platform. The revamp to the Twitter page accessible on computer web browsers comes as the San Francisco-based company seeks to ramp up engagement while managing abusive content. “We are starting to roll out a new  Twitter.com — a refreshed and updated website that is faster, easier to navigate […]

Trump can’t block Twitter critics, appeals court affirms

  WASHINGTON, D.C. (AFP) — A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that US President Donald Trump cannot legally block users on Twitter based on their political differences with him, affirming a lower court decision. The three-judge panel agreed with last year’s ruling by a federal judge that Trump was using “viewpoint discrimination” in violation of the constitutional rights of people with opposing views. The court sidestepped the question of the president’s free speech rights under […]

Outage hits Facebook, Instagram users worldwide

SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) — Facebook and Instagram users lost access to the social network’s applications in parts of the world Wednesday as a result of an outage of undetermined origin. The California giant which has more than two billion users acknowledged the outage after users noted on Twitter they could not access Facebook or had limited functionality. “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We’re […]

Typical tweet shorter since character length doubled

SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) — Twitter on Tuesday confirmed that a year after doubling the character limit for tweets, the average length of messages fired off in English actually got a smidge shorter. The news promised to allay concerns that raising the character limit from 140 to 280 last year would ruin Twitter’s succinct comment style and lead to rants, rambles and diatribes. “We made this change because we want every person around the […]

Twitter surges on profit, revenue growth

by Rob Lever Agence France-Presse WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Twitter shares flew higher Thursday after the social network reported a record quarterly profit that helped investors look past a drop in the number of users due to the weeding out of fake and abusive accounts. The San Francisco group delivered a $789 million profit, including one-time gains, compared to a net loss of $21 million in the previous year, as revenues grew 29 percent […]

Twitter dives on warning of shrinking user base

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Twitter shares took a pounding Friday as a warning of a shrinking user base overshadowed news of a third straight quarterly profit. Twitter said it posted a profit of $100 million in the second quarter, following a loss of $116 million a year earlier, as revenue rose 24 percent to $711 million. But the San Francisco-based firm said its base of monthly active users fell by one million from the […]

Twitter curbs access for 143,000 apps in new crackdown

WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Twitter said Tuesday it had removed more than 143,000 apps from the messaging service since April in a fresh crackdown on “malicious” activity from automated accounts. The San Francisco-based social network said it was tightening access to its application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows developers to make automated Twitter posts. “We’re committed to providing access to our platform to developers whose products and services make Twitter a better place,” said […]

Twitter shares fall on worries about user base

NEW YORK, United States (AFP) – Twitter shares tumbled Monday on concerns the social media’s efforts to crack down on fake accounts would affect its user base, and potentially its finances. At 1810 GMT, shares of the social media company were down 6.0 percent at $43.89 after earlier shedding almost 10 percent. The decline follows a report late Friday in the Washington Post that described how Twitter’s greater scrutiny of user data had resulted in […]

Twitter to confirm new accounts in spam fight

SAN  FRANCISCO, United States (AFP)–Twitter on Tuesday said it will begin asking for email addresses or phone numbers to confirm new accounts as part of a battle against manipulation, particularly by automated bots. Adding a way to check that a real person is behind new accounts was described by Twitter as being among measures to fight abuse, trolls, and hateful content. “This is an important change to defend against people who try to take advantage […]

Trump hits critics of his summit with Kim, says “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea”

  (Eagle News) – United States President Donald Trump hit his critics who had nothing good to say about his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, as he stressed the importance of his talk with Kim which he said prevented a “potential nuclear catastrophe.” Trump pointed out that before the historic summit with Kim on Tuesday, June 12, many were talking about conciliation and peace and had wanted the meeting to […]