Twitter has been in the news a lot this week, with a lot of people talking about the fact that Twitter is in the news on Twitter. Is that the social media equivalent of typing Google into Google?
One Directioners scare the living crap out of GQ magazineOn Monday evening, GQ unveiled its September issue, with five different covers each featuring a different member of One Direction. Innocent enough. On the Harry Styles cover, the magazine chose to go with the caption ‘He’s up all night to get lucky’. Again, nothing too extreme.Unless you’re a One Directioner. While the GQ team claim most of the comments were positive, there are some truly disturbing ones, in particular about the cover line from the Harry Styles edition. The One Direction fans* took it upon themselves to tweet GQ how they felt about this abomination, as well as telling them what they were going to do to them.Here is just a snippet of what they have been saying. For more gems, hit up the
GQ website. WARNING: not for the faint hearted.
I mean, seriously. What is wrong with people? Normally I absolutely love the internet, but it’s people like this that make me want to move back to rural Scotland where the broadband is too slow to even bother trying to get online. *total flipping psychopaths
Twitter abuse rowTwitter has been in the spotlight this week over how it handles abuse on the site.The campaign for a new abuse reporting system was started by Caroline Criado-Perez, the woman who successfully campaigned for women to feature on bank notes, after she was targeted by serious abuse on Twitter, including rape and murder threats.An online petition is now calling for Twitter to take a ‘zero-tolerance policy’ to abusive behaviour and MPs were yesterday planning to question Twitter execs over the site’s handling of abuse. While abuse of any form online is unacceptable, it’s slightly unfair to punish the website or platform because of it. Surely that’s just like banning pens if someone writes an abusive letter?The problem isn’t social networking sites, it’s the revolting individuals that choose to use them for telling a woman she should be raped just because she has an opinion. Just like in school, it’s a selection of individuals that ruin it for the rest of us, and these are the people that need to have their rights to use the internet revoked. Immediately.
Facebook to introduce TV adsFacebook is looking to ruin everyone’s online experience even further by putting TV adverts in your news feed. As if irrelevant brand pages popping up in your news feed isn’t enough, Facebook is apparently now going to cash in on the fact that people check their news feed during ad breaks in TV shows.The ads are rumoured to be about 15 seconds long and could earn the site as much as $2.5 million every day.Small mercies; the advert spots will be limited to three per day and the number of ads you see on your news feed won’t increase, they will just be different. I for one am certainly not a fan. I’m of the opinion that brands are actually managing to single-handedly destroy Facebook as a social network, but that’s a story for another day, kids!
Syria’s president joins InstagramPresident Bashar al-Assad has created an Instagram account in order to try and show his more likeable side.Despite the fact that he has been accused of waging chemical warfare against his own people, the Syrian president has decided that now is a good time to try and get people onside. The account was launched last week, which happened to coincide with the fact that the Syrian civil war’s death toll surpassed 100,000 bodies.If you want to take a look at the account, which is essentially just pictures of the president and his wife talking to people, then you can. The Twitter handle is… wait for it…
syrianpresidency. I KNOW, RIGHT?!
