Since January 2013 the UNHCR has registered almost 1 million Syrian refugees – an average of 250,000 people each month. Officials acknowledge that the real number of refugees is probably much higher. In addition, more than 4 million people have been internally displaced. According to the CIA World Factbook, Syria’s population is around 22 million people, meaning nearly 30 percent of Syrians have been displaced by the current violence. “I’m working in my poetry to tell the truth about my people” says Al-Masri. “The outsiders are stealing the revolution from Syrians. Hezbollah and foreign extremists are getting involved. I want the international community to give my people medicine and milk, help them survive. What can poetry do in front of all this murder? If the poet doesn’t speak, who will do it? Poetry is about freedom; it has always been about freedom.” 

Continue Reading...

Created by Scott Garner, a master's degree candidate in the interactive telecommunications department at NYU, Hell Is Other People relies on the same technology as Foursquare, an app that allows people to "check in" at various establishments to display their location to other users. Unlike Foursquare, which aims to maximize the possibility of face-to-face interaction, Hell Is Other People displays the locations of others, as well as the best routes you can take for how to avoid them.

Continue Reading...

The filibuster was a gripping spectacle that kept me rapt for hours. On Twitter, people were able to offer support, however symbolic, for Sen. Davis’ efforts. There was a sense of community. For some levity, I couldn’t help remarking on Sen. Davis’ flawless hair, several hours into her ferocious stand.

Near midnight, after some intense and partisan efforts to derail Sen. Davis’ efforts, the impassioned crowd in the gallery began shouting and cheering, letting the senator know she did not stand alone. It was a sound of women fighting for their reproductive freedom in the only way they could: with their voices. I will never forget that sound. It awoke something in me I hadn’t realized had gone dormant.

Continue Reading...

McMillan then followed it up with these tweets, captured via Topsy:

She attempted to backpedal by saying she was quoting "a Mexican friend," but as people on Twitter point out, that just made it worse:

[embedtweet id="349956443341983744"]

[embedtweet id="349916117692710912"]

[embedtweet id="349915708500619268"]

[embedtweet id="349915033431576576"]

[embedtweet id="349916236555100161"]

The writer begrudgingly apologized and insisted that her words were "taken out of context," and has since deleted all of the tweets:

Continue Reading...

Of course, I should be clear: This was my world of social media. We are filtered by whom we follow and friend. If I associated with a different motley crew, the cries of joy and rage could easily flip places. Social conservatives believe that what happened in Texas Wednesday night was a travesty of democracy and that Jesus is weeping in dismay over the prospect of a flood of gay marriage in California. And they're on Twitter too.

Continue Reading...

Some stuff makes you feel dirty. Like this Steph Strayer/ Man Bragging about Cheating on his Wife on Commuter Train/ Facebook Photo Posting Gone Viral/ Public Shaming/ Ethical Slugfest/ Gender Resentment Cesspool/ Mom Strikes Back at Dirtbag Pig Man thing.

After a week of that I feel like an old rabbi in a raincoat shuffling out of a peep show. It had everything.

So what was it about this episode that caught our emotions?

• Fear of being in a similar situation. Many of us don’t trust our spouses. It’s a primal fear that the person we sleep with will be somebody else out there. Think of those commuter train scenes in “Mad Men.”

• Solidarity with the woman for striking out. Women are powerless and mistreated in a thousand different ways every day and it feels good to see one strike out.

• Satisfaction at a man getting his just deserts. Many of us have been bullied and it feels good to see some guy get it in the neck.

The narrative is deliciously compelling. Why? Because it involves:

• The powerless taking power

• An annoying person getting his comeuppance

Continue Reading...

The "if this is your husband" pic is just the latest in a long line of public shamings on social media, the latest and most controversial being a tweet by programmer and tech evangelist Adria Richards. When Richards tweeted a picture of men she said were making inappropriate jokes (about "big dongles," specifically) at a tech conference, she was deluged with threats and eventually fired from her job.

The reaction to the "if this is your husband" poster (whose name we're not posting at this time) has been the polar opposite of that, with vitriol aimed at the purported husband and congratulations to the poster -- "Get him girl" is a representative comment. The husband poster had the advantage of being on a commuter train, not at a tech conference. At the latter, women are already often unwelcome, and speaking out against dudes, in Richards' case, only made things worse. But everybody hates a train loudmouth -- even more so, apparently, if he's an adulterer.

Continue Reading...

• In the New York Times, Felicity Barringer blames an outbreak of graffiti and vandalism in national parks on "the rise of social media." Everybody's a show-off, now.
• Bloomberg News reports that an online marketing contest for Durex condoms went "awry" when Facebook users ganged up to choose a conservative Islamic town named Batman, in southeastern Turkey, as the site of a test rollout of a new condom delivery service.
• Also in Bloomberg: a report that students using the Russian equivalent of Facebook have been taking advantage of Russia's nine time zones to share questions and answers on the country's equivalent of the SAT examination.

The common theme to all these stories is that the use of social media is enabling bad behavior on a broader, more destructive scale. So maybe it's time to turn the Internet off? I mean, enough is enough, right?

Continue Reading...

In Turkey, what started as a small group of protesters attempting to stop the bulldozing of some trees in a public park developed with startling speed into a huge mass demonstration -- all in the absence of any meaningful coverage from traditional media outlets. Tufekci took some time out from her crazy morning to share her insights into the specifics of Turkey's situation, as well as explore the larger question of how social-media protests fit into the political process.

Continue Reading...

Here’s how the research breaks down. The joint paper found that teenagers are sharing more and more personal information online: 91 percent of teenagers post at least one photo of themselves (up from 79 percent in 2006), while 71 percent post their school name (up from 49 percent), 53 percent post their email address (up from 29 percent), and 20 percent post their cell phone number (up from two percent). At the same time, teenagers are more and more cautious as to who sees this information: about 60 percent of teen Facebook users set their profiles to private (friends only), and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings, with 56 percent of users noting that it’s “not difficult at all” to set privacy controls (while only eight percent say it’s “somewhat difficult”).

Continue Reading...

Prosecutors say the girl went to the home of Scandale Fritz last December and, "after she declined his demands for sex, he raped and sodomized her," and then "demanded the girl have sex with the other two boys" while he recorded it. Chillingly, prosecutors add that Fritz's companion Kenneth Brown can be seen holding a gun in the video. After the incident, the girl filed a police report and was examined at a local hospital. Two days after the alleged assault, the video appeared on all three boys' Facebook pages. Prosecutors say that Fritz has already provided "a handwritten statement to his involvement."

Continue Reading...

But that's exactly the argument that was made this week by attorneys in Virginia federal appeals court, where judges are set to revisit the issue of whether or not a Facebook like qualifies as protected speech.

The three-judge panel heard oral arguments and is poised to deliver a ruling on the case of six former employees of the Hampton, Va., sheriff's department who say they were fired for liking their boss's political rival on Facebook during a 2009 campaign. Along with attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and Facebook itself, the fired employees' lawyers are attempting to reverse a lower court ruling that argued Facebook likes are not substantive enough to be protected by the First Amendment.

Continue Reading...

Via BusinessWeek:

On Tuesday, the company announced that using special forensics software they can now effectively retrieve long-vanished Snapchats from a phone. “This type of information can be very valuable in any investigation, especially one involving exploitation of a minor,” said Richard Hickman, a lead examiner at Decipher Forensics. “This research will help law enforcement officials retrieve what has been believed to be unrecoverable.”

... Right now the service is limited to smartphones running Android software. But, reached by phone on Thursday morning, Hickman says the company is busy working to extend the Snapchat-recovery service to iPhones.

How much does it cost to recover Snapchat photos? Decipher Forensics charges $300 to $500 per phone, says Hickman.

Continue Reading...

The popular link- and photo-sharing website has rolled out an update, one offering people simpler navigation and new ways to arrange their boards to fit their needs. Although the haphazard spirit of Pinterest remains, the site is much less overwhelming.

I wasn't a Pinterest user before, so the redesign gave me a chance to take a good look at the site for the first time. Before that, I had refused to be sucked into yet another form of social media. I figured I didn't have much use for it.

In the months since I started testing out Pinterest's new look, though, I've found the service helpful in organizing and sharing my continually expanding recipe collection. And it's fun to check what other people around the world are looking at and to see which strangers choose to follow me or respond to what I'm sharing.

Although it is not a replacement for Facebook or Twitter, and doesn't pretend to be, it is a beautiful and vast world with more than 25 million users around the world.

Continue Reading...

Several news outlets reported that a collective of hackers known as the Syrian Electronic Army hijacked the Onion's Twitter feed this afternoon, posting a string of unfunny, pro-Syrian army tweets:

"Israel denies forging new alliance with Al Qaeda: "We were friends all along, so it can't be new" - IDF Spokesperson"

"UN's Ban Ki Moon condemns Syria for being struck by israel: "It was in the way of Jewish missiles"

"UN retracts report of Syrian chemical weapon use: "Lab tests confirm it is Jihadi body odor"

Messages saying "Syrian Electronic Army Was Here" appeared on the satirical news network's various social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter, as well.

Continue Reading...

So we chatted. The big news: Facebook promises that within just a couple of weeks mobile users will get new controls that will allow us to block specific advertisers. These controls will be similar to those that currently exist for the desktop Facebook experience. Individual Facebook users can decide for themselves how excited they are by this pledge. As I wrote on Wednesday, Facebook's track record on the desktop advertising experience leaves something to be desired. (To be fair, Facebook's spokeperson acknowledged that the company's ad-delivery algorithms are not "perfect.")

Continue Reading...

What he actually said, in a debate with Mark Andreessen at the Milken Institute Global Conference, according to CNN, was that "Twitter's roughly 1,000 employees will have jobs a decade from now," because "the business case for Twitter is solid," while employees of the New York Times "should be worried about the longevity of their jobs" because the newspaper "is not guaranteed a future in the digital age."

Please. No one is guaranteed a future in the digital age. But if I had to pick one paper that had the best chance of surviving and thriving, I'd probably choose the New York Times, a newspaper that continues to provide indispensable, in-depth reporting on topics of great social importance. And if I had to pick one social media network that was most likely to survive, I'd pick ... well, who the hell knows? Social media networks, so far, have the lifespan of butterflies. They look nice for a few minutes, and then they're gone. Poof! Friendster, MySpace, et cetera.

Continue Reading...

I started writing my review of Twitter Music while listening to a George Jones country song I'd never heard before: "The King Is Gone (and so are you.)" I listened to a lot of George Jones on the day I learned he died. It seemed appropriate, if a bit macabre, to follow him on Twitter Music and see what sort of songs might pop up as a result.

I'm not going to list "The King Is Gone" in my top ten George Jones pantheon (frankly, any chorus with the words "yabba dabba doo" is right out) but I'm glad I heard it. I love being exposed to new music (even if, and sometimes especially if, it's old music).

Twitter Music is all about the social discovery of new music. It suggests for your listening pleasure songs that are already popular on Twitter, songs that the people you follow are tweeting about and listening to, and songs from artists who are in mysterious ways connected to the musicians that you choose to follow. It's confusing in a good, serendipitous, jumbled up kind of way. You're never quite sure how exactly the algorithm works that is generating the tunes, but that's OK. The whole point is discovery, hearing something new that you might like, generated through a fortuitous crunching of your social relationships. If you have a Spotify or Rdio premium account you can listen to the entirety of the songs; if you have iTunes you get a 30-second clip and the option to buy.

Continue Reading...

Seems his fellow Republicans did not appreciate what Kush said on Twitter and Facebook regarding a 19-year-old female at the meeting, "Nice hat Working America chick but damn you are a radical bitch." Nor did it enjoy his remarks depicting the organization's state director Chelsey Evans as "Uh oh another Working America chick," or his observation that she had "nice boots…I know she makes more than min wage." And they definitely didn't find it too amusing when he declared that she "was hot enough to almost make me register democrat."

He's currently suspended, indefinitely, without pay.

"It was an ill-fated attempt at humor," Kush told Watchdog.org Wednesday. "Do I regret it? Yes … I absolutely crossed the line."

Continue Reading...

We’ve seen the most famous TV network in the news business repeatedly botch basic facts, while one of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers misreported the number of people killed, launched a wave of hysteria over a “Saudi national” who turned out to have nothing to do with the crime, and then published a cover photo suggesting that two other guys (also innocent) might be the bombers. We’ve seen the vaunted crowd-sourcing capability of Reddit degenerate into self-reinforcing mass delusion, in which a bunch of people whose law-enforcement expertise consisted of massive doses of “CSI” convinced themselves that a missing college student was one of the bombing suspects. (He wasn’t – and with that young man’s fate still unknown, how does his family feel today?)

Continue Reading...