Read Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump (blog.twitter.com)
After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.

Too little, too late, but nonetheless.

Read VCBrags did one last thing before deleting their account: a frame-up (savingjournalism.substack.com)
[Editor’s Note: It’s now November 10th, some two months after initial publication. I received substantial feedback about my presentation of the evidence here, and I believe a postmortem is warranted. I reached out to VCBrags on October 5th to see if they’d cooperate. I have yet to receive a reply. I expect to publish something this month either way, which I’ll link here at the top. All the other edit marks below are from the first 24 hours or so. The post hasn’t been touched since.]
Read @VCBrags, Viciousness, and Pasquale D'Silva (Sonya Supposedly)
I'm sure Pasquale won't mind serving as a case study, given his glee at the association: I’m HONORED / BLESSED that some of you Silicon Valley tech dweebs think that I was @vcbrags. To be honest, I’m so dumb about VC, half the jokes from the account flew over
Read The Enduring Mystery Around An Anonymous Twitter Account That Infuriated Tech’s Kingpins—And Nearly Ruined A Founder’s Reputation by Abram Brown (Forbes)
By lampooning venture capitalists, @VCBrags accumulated an audience that included billionaires Jack Dorsey and Mark Cuban—and enmity from many of the people it skewered.
Read 2020-11-04: New Twitter UI: Replaying Archived Twitter Pages That Never Existed by Himarsha Jayanetti (ws-dl.blogspot.com | The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University.)
When you visit web archives to go back in time and look at a web page, you naturally expect it to display the content exactly as it appeared on the live web at that particular datetime. That is, of course, with the assumption in mind that all of the resources on the page were captured at or near the time of the datetime displayed in the banner for the root HTML page. However, we noticed that it is not always the case and problems with archiving Twitter's new UI can result in replaying Twitter profile pages that never existed on the live web. In our previous blog post, we talked about how difficult it is to archive Twitter's new UI, and in this blog post, we uncover how the new Twitter UI mementos in the Internet Archive are vulnerable to temporal violations.
An interesting quirk of archiving pages on the modern internet.
Read Alternative Tweet Embedding by Stefan Bohacek (fourtonfish.com)
When you embed Tweets on your website, Twitter asks you to include their JavaScript code that adds images, number of likes, and loads their styles. But looking at the size of all the script files (yes, the one script tag loads multiple JavaScript files), does quite a bit more than that, including tracking your website’s users. And it has pretty negative impact on your site’s performance as measured by Google PageSpeed.
Update: This seems to have disappeared and roughly remapped to https://fourtonfish.com/project/tweet-embeds-wordpress-plugin/
Read That’s Yikes…Chillian J. Yikes! by Jillian C. York (jilliancyork.com)
In possibly the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me on the Internet (and please remember that I’ve been called a fattie by the daughter of the Uzbek dictator and crowdfunded my ticket to troll a Thomas Friedman event), the New York Times, that paper of record, has today issued a correction that’s been called “the best thing on the Internet this week.”
I know this Twitter Halloween name phenomenon has been going on for several years. This is one of the earliest examples I’ve seen. Interesting that it caused a correction in the New York Times.
Read More than 280 characters by Gary Pendergast (Gary Pendergast)
It’s hard to be nuanced in 280 characters. The Twitter character limit is a major factor of what can make it so much fun to use: you can read, publish, and interact, in extremely short, digestible chunks. But, it doesn’t fit every topic, ever time. Sometimes you want to talk about complex topics...
Nice mention of the influence of IndieWeb ideas of POSSE and Tweetstorm here.
Read A White Male Professor Reportedly Faked Being a Woman of Color, This Time to Troll Scientists on Twitter (Jezebel)
Somehow, beyond all reason and understanding, another person has been caught pretending to be a woman of color. At least this time around, the story has an extra fucked-up layer. Anonymous internet sleuths uncovered Professor Craig Chapman, who teaches chemistry at the University of New Hampshire, posing as a woman of color on Twitter under the name The Science Femme. According to The New Hampshire, Chapman was brought down by his own hubris when he tweeted about his brother’s brewery from both his fake account and his real account. The Science Femme and Chapman’s personal account have both been deleted, but unluckily for him, screenshots exist.
A good reminder that I really should unsubscribe to “people” I don’t know personally or have an exceptionally high expectation of who they really are and what content I’m actually consuming.
Read “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation (BuzzFeed News)
A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew about specific examples of global political manipulation — and failed to act.
A reminder to continue on my quest to remove my data from Facebook and delete my account.

“In the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren’t respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole,” Zhang said. 

Sad that one would have to act like a techbro to have their message at work be heard.
Annotated on September 14, 2020 at 09:40PM

Read Jetpack 8.9: New ways to grow subscribers and collect donations by Jeremy Herve (Jetpack — Essential Security & Performance for WordPress)
This month, start engaging your site visitors with two exciting new tools! The Newsletter Sign-up form and Donations Block will help you grow your subscriber and supporter base. Jetpack 8.9 is also proud to support v2.0 of the official AMP plugin for WordPress. Convert visitors into subscribers wit...
They’ve added social reviews to allow one to preview how posts will appear on Facebook, Twitter, and Google search results before you publish them.
Read OMG! Twitter release an OFFICIAL conversations API! by Terence Eden (shkspr.mobi)
One of the most requested Twitter API features is now available – the ability to get replies to a Tweet as a thread.
Long time readers know that I’ve long been a fan of Visualising Twitter Conversations in 2D Space. But up until now you had to use horrible hacks to get the data. As trailed in th...