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How to be internet famous—for real this time
To paraphrase a character on Seinfeld, I’m real and I’m spectacular. Unlike Santiago Swallow, the alter ego of a Quartz contributor, I didn’t need to spend $68 or even $50 or one cent to become...
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#FinanceDerbyHorseNames don’t have anything on these real-life horses of finance
Because it’s Friday, and tomorrow is the Kentucky Derby, we spent much of the morning tweeting #FinanceDerbyHorseNames. And the hashtag—essentially, financial terms that would work equally well as the...
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The first-ever hashtag, @-reply and retweet, as Twitter users invented them
Twitter is pretty simple, but it started out even simpler. The 140-character messaging service launched on March 21, 2006 with no way to send a reply or retweet someone. And it certainly didn’t have...
View ArticleThe NYPD just figured out the perfect way to publicize its own worst moments...
The New York Police Department just got a, shall we say, brutal lesson in social media. A little before 3pm New York time this afternoon, the NYPD tweeted out a seemingly innocuous three sentences,...
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Twitter is hoping the World Cup will help fix its biggest problem
Twitter is going all out for the World Cup. Today it turned on hashflags, a feature which places a tiny emoticon of a country’s flag inside tweets with a # and the relevant country code for...
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Twitter hashtags are finally neutralizing the Israeli government’s propaganda
I told CNN during a recent television interview that there hasn’t been a single hot-button topic treated with more intellectually dishonest, one-sided coverage than that which the American media has...
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This is what Indians loved on Twitter in 2014
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi may not be the face on TIME magazine’s cover this year, but there’s one place he is definitely winning—on Twitter. Modi’s triumphant tweet after the Lok Sabha polls...
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Sydney is showing solidarity with Muslims with the hashtag #illridewithyou
Amid the ongoing hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia, social media is overflowing with the hashtag #illridewithyou. Meant initially as an offer to actually ride with Muslims who might feel unsafe using...
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#IndiawithPakistan shows that solidarity trumps political disputes
Horrific is an understatement to describe the day in Peshawar, Pakistan, where Taliban terrorists took over a military school, killing at least 141 people, most of whom were school children (the latest...
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It’s beautiful to watch the spread of #JeSuisCharlie across the world
Following the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, millions tweeted using the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie to honor the 12 victims and support their commitment to free speech and...
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The American Dialect Society’s word of the year is not a word
#blacklivesmatter is word of the year. The 126-year-old American Dialect Society (ADS) was one of the first organizations to reflect on 12 months of language use and pronounce some word or phrase the...
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Timeline: Rahul Gandhi, lost and found
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who was on an almost two-month-long sabbatical, is back. The Gandhi scion took an impromptu break from politics on Feb. 23 and has returned to India after 53 days....
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Mapping and translating the emoji universe on Instagram
Nearly 40% of text comments on Instagram contain at least one emoji, making the photo-sharing app a ripe dataset for analysis of how people use the expressive symbols on their phones. The image above,...
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Africans are crowd-sourcing beautiful images of their lives to fight media...
Most of the world sees Africa in media images of starving children, war, and exotic wildlife, so it may come as news to some that Africa has high fashion, beautiful architecture, vibrant universities,...
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Hashtags have become the Islamic State’s propaganda vehicle of choice
If social media is the battleground for jihadist propagandizing, then hashtags are the Islamic State’s weapon of choice. A June report (pdf) by the Quilliam Foundation, a think tank, found that Twitter...
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With sarcastic hashtags, Parisians are defiantly asserting their joie de vivre
It’s been almost a year since the world proudly declared itself #JeSuisCharlie. Millions of people used the hashtag to show solidarity to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo shooting and proclaim their...
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#JeSuisChien: The world affectionately mourns a French police dog killed in...
Les chiens d'assaut et de recherche d'explosifs: indispensables dans les missions des opérateurs du #RAID pic.twitter.com/vb5lGjnwjO — Police nationale (@PoliceNationale) November 18, 2015 A defiant,...
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India’s Twitter is all about Bollywood—and Narendra Modi
Last year, Narendra Modi laid claim to the most popular tweet by an Indian. The Indian prime minister’s triumphant message after the general elections was retweeted by more than 75,000 people. India...
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In Malaysia, #RespectMyPM is backfiring in spectacular fashion
They probably should have seen this coming. A Twitter hashtag meant to show support for Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak—#RespectMyPM—has backfired. Now, it’s being used to criticize the...
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Twitter’s attempt to simplify its service is confusing even its power users
Today (May 24), Twitter announced a number of sweeping changes that rethink its 140-character limit. For the social network, which has struggled to attract new users, it’s an attempt to simplify the...
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