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Does Social Media Curb Or Promote Terrorism And Violence?

This article was originally published on Smedio.

I often say that social media is a powerful monster and with power, comes responsibility. If you use it for constructive means, it pays off. If you don’t get it right, you pay for it. Though it’s hard to believe, social media has been directly or indirectly associated with a large number of incidents related to violence, terrorism and uprisings all over the world.

Whether it’s the revolts in Egypt and Libya, the recent riots in London or the more recent ‘Twitter Terrorism’ in Mexico, social media is now the de-facto trigger for such events across the world. On one hand, it has freed nations from dictators but on the other, it has promoted looting and served as a medium for communal violence.

I don’t think anyone could have imagined that social media would play such an important role in global peace or the lack of it. In this post, I pour my heart out and present my opinion on whether social media curbs or promotes terrorism and violence.

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Twitter's expanded promoted tweets program starts rollout today

Twitter has long planned an expansion of its promoted tweets program as part of its goal to generate profit.

Rolling out today, Twitter will add paid tweets to users' timelines from companies they may not be following (before, paid tweets would only appear if you followed that company). Not everyone will see these tweets immediately. Right now, less than 10% of users will see them as the microblogging platform gradually expands this new ad system.

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Twitter announces analytics service for publishers using technology from Toronto's Backtype

Twitter today announced an analytics service for publishers at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Twitter's Director of Web Business Development April Underwood unveiled Twitter Web Analytics, leveraging technology from the microblogging platform's July acquisition of Backtype.

The analytics dashboard will show which stories are the most shared and the most discussed, and which referring sites are sending the most traffic. Twitter's new link wrapper, "t.co," is driving 100 million clicks a day. April stated that an API into this data will be made available.

Social media account for 22% of the time we spend online: Study

Social media is the number one category in terms of how we spend our time online, according to Nielson's “State of the Media: The Social Media Report." It accounts for a whopping 22.5% of Americans' online time.

This statistic is powered largely by Facebbok, which reaches 70% of the country's population. The report revealed that Americans spend over 50 billion minutes on Facebook every month, not even including time spent accessing it via mobile devices. Given that Canadians are even more addicted to social media than our southern neighbours, it's safe to say we clock in it at least 5 billion minutes monthly.

Other popular time consumers were Blogger (720 million minutes monthly), Tumblr (620 million), Twitter (565 million), and LinkedIn (325 million).

Twitter to serve up more ads as mobile usage explodes but company still has no timeline for IPO

Real-time information network Twitter plans to serve up more of its tweet-based advertisements to users as it ramps up for a potential IPO in 2012, although CEO Dick Costolo says the microblogging platform has not set a timeline and will only go public on its own terms.

Twitter has more than 200 million registered users and mobile usage is growing by 40% per quarter, the company says, and sees 400 million unique visitors monthly, already up 60% from the year's start.

However, only half of Twitter's users log on daily (although that's still much better than Google+).

 

Is an Internet with increased geofencing becoming too local in spite of a worldwide economy?

In light of Flickr, the photo uploading and sharing service introducing geofences which allow you to designate a certain geographic area in which your photos can be viewed, there are a variety of ways in which geofences could have serious ramifications for those that currently rely on the Internet to work from abroad. 

For the Internet as North Americans know it has often been the proponent of being able to connect with people anytime, anyplace and anywhere in the world. If an e-mail user were to block all incoming messages from Canada, then that would be an example of geofencing.

Let me be clear that I am not against the geofencing of personal photos or information. I am however concerned with the general direction the Internet has been developing in as of late. The mere fact that we are becoming geofenced in light of a global world driven by a global economy. 

How much geofencing is too much geofencing?

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Canadian companies aren't using social effectively: Study

Just 17% of Canadian companies post to social media sites regularly and monitor often for corporate mention, a new study by SAS and Leger discovered.

While 30 per cent of executives interviewed said their company posts to social media sites at least several times a week, only three in five of those often monitor social media conversations. For those that don't actively monitor for mentions, half of them cited a lack of resources as the reason they aren't doing it more often.

A quarter of respondents (24 per cent) said social media strategies and tactics are driven by the CEO. Twenty-one per cent said efforts are driven by the director of communications, while 18 per cent cited the chief marketing officer as the corporate social media lead. 13% of those surveyed said their company does not engage in social media at all because it is viewed as a waste of time and effort.

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Beyonce's baby bump breaks Twitter record, and convincingly so

Popular singer and wife to Jay-Z, Beyonce revealed a baby bump at MTV's VMA awards show last night.

Big news in the celebrity world, for sure… but a world Twitter record? Apparently that, too.

Twitter exploded with 8,900 tweets per second when Beyonce's pregnancy was made public during the show, shattering the previous record of 7,200 during the U.S. women's soccer team against Japan in July.

Other milestones were 5,100 tweets per second to mark Bin Laden's death, 6,900 during the Japanese tsunami, and 4,000 for the 2011 Super Bowl.

MTV.com also saw record online views of the event, as did MTV's mobile site.

Now that's star power.

How long will this record last? And what will break it?

Setting a new personal record, Twitter eclipses LinkedIn traffic for the first time ever

Twitter leads the pack of the big three social networks in terms of traffic growth, according to a new comScore report.

Ranked number 34 in a top-50 list of websites based on U.S. traffic, Twitter's increase of 32% dwarfed Facebook's 11% growth. Meanwhile, the professional-oriented LinkedIn is suffering from stagnation—it saw 32.5 million visitors in July, down from 33-million-plus in both June and May.

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