Heena Sharma Blog

  Twitter has announced that users can use their security keys as only form of two-factor authentication (2FA) on both mobile and web, which is the most effective way to keep the Twitter account secure. In March, Twitter had said it would soon let people use a security key as their only two-factor authentication method. Security keys are small devices that act like keys to your house. Just as you need a physical key to unlock the door to your home, you need a security key to unlock access to your account. "Security keys offer the strongest protection for your Twitter account because they have built-in protections to ensure that even if a key is used on a phishing site, the information shared can't be used to access your account," Twitter said in a statement on Wednesday. Security keys can differentiate legitimate sites from malicious ones and block phishing attempts that SMS or verification codes would not. Read More

  The deadline to comply with the new legal rules meant for big social media platforms , which were issued by the government three months ago, is ending on Tuesday, threatening the operations of the likes of Twitter in India. According to top official sources, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and others, which were required to abide by the rules notified in the gazette of India on February 25 under Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021, have failed to comply on many accounts till date. The government's rules will come into effect from May 26. "If social media companies do not obey the rules, they may lose their status and protections as intermediaries and may become liable for criminal action as per the existing laws of India," top official sources said. Except one Indian social media company, Koo, sources said that none of the top social media intermediaries have appointed a resident grievance officer, a chief complianc...

  Twitter has added a new prompt in the timelines of users to help them get correct vaccination information in their respective countries including India. The new prompt appears at the top of users' Twitter feeds for both iOS and Android users. "As COVID-19 vaccinations become more widely available, we want you to have access to the latest vaccine info in your country," Twitter said in a tweet on Monday. "This week you'll see a prompt in your timeline that links to sources about vaccine safety, efficacy, and news from public heath experts," the company added. Clicking on the link will take you to the information page prepared with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in India, and organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US. Read More

  Tecno Spark 7 is a budget-friendly smartphone packed with features that will launch in India on Friday. It will be available on Amazon. Tecno Mobile is a global mobile brand from TRANSSION Holdings, a phone manufacturing company in China. The company has been trying to ramp up its portfolio in India. The company last September launched Tecno Spark 6, which was the previous version of Tecno Spark 7 . Tecno has shared some promotional images and features of the phone on Amazon and its social media account on Twitter. Let’s take a look at what Tecno Spark 7 has on offer: Techno Spark 7 specifications Techno Spark 7 will have a 6.56-inch LCD IPS display with a pixel density of 273 ppi. The phone will have a waterdrop-styled notched display which will accommodate the front camera. The smartphone will come with a triple-camera setup at the back. It is likely to have a 13MP primary camera along with a 5 MP camera. It will be equipped with an 8 MP camera in the front along with...

  Twitter has announced it is running a test with select iOS and Android users to give people an accurate preview of how their images will appear when they Tweet a photo. Currently, Twitter algorithms automatically crops images to make them display in a more condensed way in the timeline. Going forward, people in the test will see that most Tweets with a single image in standard aspect ratio will appear uncropped when posted. "People will see exactly what the image will look like in the composer tool before it's posted. Very wide or tall images will be center-cropped," Dantley Davis, Chief Design Officer at Twitter said late on Wednesday. Twitter's automatic image cropping has been a problem for photographers and artists. "With this test, we hope to learn if this new approach is better and what changes we need to make to provide a 'what you see is what you get' experience for Tweets with images," Davis said in a tweet. Read More

  Twitter is planning a new tool to let users automatically block and mute abusive accounts. With the new safety mode, the micro-blogging platform will automatically detect accounts that "might be acting abusive or spammy." The company will limit how those accounts can engage with your content for seven days. During its virtual Analyst Day on Thursday, the company showed a presentation where a slide revealed that the feature will be a toggle in the new safety mode. "Automatically block accounts that appear to break the Twitter Rules, and mute accounts that might be using insults, name-calling, strong language, or hateful remarks," the description read. Currently, not many Twitter users in India are aware of how to report abuse or harassment they face on the open communication platform, opting for the wrong way of posting an abusive photo or tweet and then requesting us to take action. Read More

  Twitter has allowed third-party academic researchers free access to the full history of public conversation via the full-archive search endpoint, which was previously limited to paid premium or enterprise customers. Twitter API was first introduced in 2006 and since then, academic researchers have used data from the public conversation to study topics as diverse as the conversation on Twitter itself. These include state-backed efforts to disrupt the public conversation to floods and climate change, from attitudes and perceptions about COVID-19 to efforts to promote healthy conversation online. "Today, academic researchers are one of the largest groups of people using the Twitter API," the company said in a blog post late on Tuesday. With the new Academic Research product track on the Twitter API, qualified researchers will have access to all data released to date. They will have higher levels of access to the Twitter developer platform for free, including a sign...

  Twitter has announced to remove tweets making false or misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccinations from next week and label such fake claims from early next year. Starting next week, Twitter will prioritise the removal of the most harmful misleading information. Using a combination of technology and human review, Twitter said that it will begin enforcing this updated policy on December 21 and expanding its actions during the following weeks. From early 2021, Twitter may label or place a warning on Tweets that advance unsubstantiated rumours, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines. "We will enforce this policy in close consultation with local, national and global public health authorities around the world, and will strive to be iterative and transparent in our approach," the micro-blogging platform said in a statement late on Wednesday. Read More

Twitter has made it possible for its users to now share their tweets directly on Snapchat. Till date, one had to take a screenshot of the tweet and then share that on the photo-sharing platform Snapchat. Currently available for iOS users, press the share button on a public tweet (private tweets aren't supported) and select the Snapchat icon from the share carousel, reports The Verge.   The users can then create a snap of the tweet and share it with people, or add it to their stories on Snapchat. "Twitter also says that a small group of iOS users will be able to test sharing tweets to Instagram Stories soon"., the report said on Thursday. The feature will be rolled out to Android users later, according to the report. Earlier this month, Twitter turned off its threaded replies experiment as it made conversations hard to read and shut down its beta app called twitter, designed for experiments like threaded replies. Read More    

  Twitter , which paused its public verification process or that elusive Blue Badge three years ago, on Tuesday announced to relaunch verification, including a new public application process, in early 2021. Before it reopens the verification process that saw its share of controversies in the past couple of years, the micro-blogging platform is asking the public to share feedback on a draft of its new verification policy. "Calling for public feedback has become an important part of our policy development process because we want to ensure that, as an open service, our rules reflect the voices of the people who use Twitter," the company said in a statement. "If you prefer to Tweet your feedback, we'll be listening there, too. Use the hashtag #VerificationFeedback . The public feedback period starts today, November 24, and continues until December 8," Twitter informed. Read More

  Twitter on Tuesday announced it is set to show a warning notification when the users try to like a labeled tweet. The micro-blogging platform began showing a warning before the 2020 US presidential election when the users tried to retweet a flagged tweet. Now, the company has expanded the warning functionality which is rolling out on the Web and iOS first and will come to Android devices in the coming weeks. "Giving context on why a labeled Tweet is misleading under our election, COVID-19, and synthetic and manipulated media rules is vital," Twitter said. "These prompts helped decrease Quote Tweets of misleading information by 29 per cent so we're expanding them to show when you tap to like a labeled Tweet," the company said in a tweet. Read More      

  When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives were asked to imagine their company acting as a “Good Censor,” in order to limit the impact of users “behaving badly.” In a 2016 internal video, Nick Foster, Google’s head of design, envisioned a “goal-driven ledger” of all users’ data, endowed with its own “volition or purpose,” which would nudge us to take decisions (say, about shopping or travel) that would “reflect Google’s values as an organization.” If that doesn’t strike you as weird — like dialogue from some dystopian science-fiction novel — then you need to read more dystopian science fiction. (Start with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s astonishingly prescient “We.”) The lowliest employees of big tech companies — the content moderators whose job it is to spot bad stuff online — offer a rather different perspective. “Remember ‘We’re the free speech wing of the free speech party’?” one ...

  Twitter has expanded its new voice tweet feature to more iOS users that allows them to record an audio clip and send that via a tweet. Voice tweets on the platform will come to Android and the web in 2021. Twitter also has plans to add transcriptions to voice tweets to improve accessibility, reports The Verge. Twitter last month said it's planning to add automated captions to audio and video on the platform by early 2021, a feature that would help people with disabilities access the service in a much meaningful way. It's, however, unclear when transcriptions might be available in voice tweets. Read More

  Twitter Inc appointed Rinki Sethi, a former information security executive at IBM, as its chief information security officer, the social media company said in a tweet Sethi had previously worked as the vice president of information security at cyber-security firm Palo Alto Networks Inc, according to her LinkedIn profile. Reuters reported in July that Twitter, which had been without a security chief since December, stepped up its search in the weeks before the breach of high-profile accounts on its platform. Earlier in July, the company had reported a breach where hackers accessed its internal systems to hijack some of the platform's top voices including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden and reality TV star Kim Kardashian and used them to solicit digital currency. Read More

  Prime Minister Narendra Modi 's account on the micro-blogging website Twitter was hacked briefly. The social media giant confirmed the compromise and said "active investigation" was underway. The hack appears to have happened during the wee hours of Thursday and the hacker group John Wick posted tweets appeared urging followers to make donations to 'PM National Relief Fund for COVID-19' through cryptocurrency. The account is linked to Modi's personal website narendramodi.in and has around 2.5 million followers since it was created in May 2011. "We're aware of this activity and have taken steps to secure the compromised account. We are actively investigating the situation. At this time, we are not aware of additional accounts being impacted," said Twitter India spokeswoman in response to queries. Read More               

Twitter will begin to label and in some cases remove doctored or manipulated photos, audio and videos that are designed to mislead people. The company said on Tuesday that the new rules prohibit sharing synthetic or manipulated material that's likely to cause harm. Material that is manipulated but isn't necessarily harmful may get a warning label. Under the new guidelines, the slowed-down video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which she appeared to slur her words could get the label if someone tweets it out after the rules go into effect March 5. If it was proven that it also causes harm, Twitter could also remove it. But deciding what might cause harm could be difficult to define, and some material will likely fall into a gray area. "This will be a challenge and we will make errors along the way - we appreciate the patience," Twitter said in a blog post. Read More

Online platforms including Facebook and Alphabet Inc's Google face growing pressure to stop carrying political ads that contain false or misleading claims ahead of the US presidential election. In the United States, the Communications Act prevents broadcast stations from rejecting or censoring ads from candidates for federal office once they have accepted advertising for that political race, although this does not apply to cable networks like CNN, or to social media sites, where leading presidential candidates are spending millions to target voters in the run-up to the November 2020 election. The following is how social media platforms have decided to handle false or misleading claims in political ads: Facebook Facebook exempts politicians from its third-party fact-checking program, allowing them to run ads with false claims. The policy has been attacked by regulators and lawmakers who say it could spread misinformation and cause voter suppression. Critics including...

Internet advertising is “incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions”, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said early on Thursday while discontinuing political ads from the microblogging platform globally. Dorsey said the company would share the final policy by November 15, and will start enforcing it from November 22, to provide advertisers a notice period. Political ads on social media platforms have been a growing cause for concern globally, especially since reports of foreign interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections surfaced. India also cracked down heavily on advertising content placed by political parties in the run up to the General Elections this year. Vipul Mudgal, director at advocacy firm Common Cause, said once Twitter releases the full policy, things would become clearer. “I want to see if their policy is US oriented and ...

A day after Zomato snubbed a customer who refused an order from a non-Hindu rider, #ZomatoUninstalled trended on Twitter on Thursday, with many accusing the online food delivery platform of bias. # BoycottUberEats also caught on after UberEats backed its rival’s “Food has no religion” comment. Even as the incident had social media divided, the Jabalpur police in Madhya Pradesh sought an undertaking from the Zomato customer that he would not spread religious hatred. The controversy began on Tuesday when a Zomato customer tweeted: “Just cancelled an order on @ZomatoIN they allocated a non-Hindu rider for my food they said they can't change rider and can't refund on cancellation. I said you can't force me to take a delivery. I don't want don't refund just cancel.” In response, the official Twitter handle of Zomato tweeted, “Food doesn’t have a religion. It is a religion.” Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal tweeted: “We are proud of the idea of India — and the...

Facebook and Twitter have apparently not been invited by the White House to a social media summit hosted by President Donald Trump for a robust conversation on the challenges of the online environment, according to a media report. The summit, set for Thursday, is to address issues relevant to social media, all the more important as Trump utilizes the platforms like no other president before him. The two prominent social media companies were not extended invitations, CNN was quoted the sources familiar with the matter as saying. The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, suggested it was not surprising. They said they believe the summit would amount to a right-wing grievance session and was not aimed at seriously discussing some of the issues facing large technology companies, the report added. The White House, however, refused to comment, the report said. A Social Media Summit without representation from the giants like Facebook and Twitter cannot be thought o...