“‘Timing is Everything’ displays historical data showing when audiences are on Twitter watching and engaging with a video highlighting the best times to tweet video content and maximise engagement, conversation, and viewership,” Ellen Fitzgerald, Product Manager, Twitter, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

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The study, led by University of Vermont researchers, is the first to look at social media patterns across different disaster types (hurricanes, floods and tornadoes).

According to the study, Twitter users with small local networks (100-200 followers) increase their activity more than those with larger networks in these situations.

Instead of relying on high-profile social media influencers to help spread important information, the study suggests efforts should be concentrated on targeting average users with meaningful networks, with compelling, accurate messages that average people will feel compelled to share in the “social wild online.”

“We found ‘average Twitter users’ tweeted more frequently about disasters, and focused on communicating key information,” said Benjamin Emery from the varsity’s Complex Systems Center and Computational Story Lab.

“While these users have fewer followers than the so-called influencers, their followers tend to have a higher proportion of friends and family, close networks that are more likely to seek and exchange useful information in emergency situations,” he added.

The results, published in the journal PLOS ONE, have important implications for organizations responsible for communicating vital information around emergencies, particularly as natural hazards increase in incidence and cost, a trend expected to continue with climate change.

“In planning for natural hazards and disasters, thinking about when and what to tweet really does matter,” said Meredith Niles from the varsity.

Researchers found key differences in tweet timing and volume, depending on the type of disaster. For hurricanes, people tweeted more frequently about emergency topics before the event, while for tornadoes and floods, which occur with less warning, Twitter was used for real-time or recovery information.

They also found terms like “groceries,” “supermarket,” and “prepare” were most frequently used before hurricanes whereas terms like “shelter,” “emergency,” “wind” or “food security” were used during and after tornadoes.

This suggests people are communicating about their preparation or recovery in real-time and sharing resources that could assist those seeking help.

“Some people around the world are experiencing an issue with notifications, Likes, and Retweets. We’re working on resolving this and will follow up soon. We apologise for the inconvenience,” Twitter Support tweeted.

However, the company did not say what caused the problem and has not specified by when the bug would be fixed.

The bug seems to have been affecting Indian users as well.

“Everything OK with @Twitter? It keeps deleting RTs & likes. Observed huge fluctuation in retweets,” Xiaomi India Managing Director and Global Vice President Manu Jain tweeted on Tuesday.

The bug made users wonder if accounts were being suspended in mass or if Twitter was deleting them, TechCrunch reported.

Twitter has a global user-base of nearly 236 million active monthly users and it is not clear how many users actually did get affected by the problem.

Earlier in February, a Twitter bug confused Android users into believing they were viewing posts from random strangers when actually it was Twitter that was mislabelling usernames on retweets.

The response, which does not provide any clue about the team size it was expanding, comes in the backdrop of apprehensions that during the upcoming 2019 general elections bad actors could use social media platforms to spread propaganda and misinformation to influence voters.

Twitter was earlier accused by the government of being “slow” in removing “objectionable content” from its platform.

The Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology (IT) wants to question the Twitter CEO over measures taken to ensure the safety and security of the users and allegations that the social media site is discriminating against “nationalist” posts on its platform.

With the Twitter CEO not showing up for the meeting on Monday, the committee has again summoned Twitter’s CEO to appear before it on February 25.

“Attempts to deliberately undermine the public conversation by spreading misinformation at scale, is something we care deeply about at Twitter,” Twitter India said in a blog post on Monday.

“And while we are working hard to expand our team and resources to help tackle this issue, it is important that everyone builds their capacity in order to protect and enhance the public conversation,” it added.

Twitter said it entered into a partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on media literacy to help its users spot false information, and also reached out to 100,000 youth across the Asia Pacific region to engage them in a series of digital citizenship workshops, safety roundtables and panel discussions.

“In India, we launched the #EduTweet initiative in partnership with the School Leaders Network where we engaged 865 school leaders, educators and influencers from 2,700 schools across India on issues such as media literacy and the digital classroom,” Twitter India said.

“We also partnered with Responsible Netism (a non-profit start up) on their Cyber Psychology Conference which engaged schools across Maharashtra on online safety for children,” it added.

இப்படி சமூக வலைத்தளங்களை பயன்படுத்தும் அரசியல்வாதிகளின் வரிசையில், பகுஜன் சமாஜ் கட்சித்தலைவர் மாயாவதியும் தற்போது இணைந்துள்ளார். டுவிட்டரில் கணக்கு ஒன்றை தொடங்கி உள்ள அவர், அதை தீவிரமாக பயன்படுத்தவும் முடிவு செய்துள்ளார். இந்த தகவலை கட்சியும் அதிகாரப்பூர்வமாக அறிவித்து உள்ளது.

பொதுமக்களுடனும், ஊடகத்தினருடனும் பேசுவதற்காக மாயாவதி, டுவிட்டரில் இணைந்திருப்பதாக அதில் கூறப்பட்டு உள்ளது.

Facebook removed 783 pages, groups and accounts that it said were directed from Iran, in some cases repurposing Iranian state media content, and engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior targeting people across the world, more heavily in the Middle East and South Asia.

“About 2 million accounts followed at least one of these Pages on Facebook, about 1,600 accounts joined at least one of these groups, and more than 254,000 accounts followed at least one of these Instagram accounts,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy said in a blog post late Thursday.

Some of the activities on these accounts date back to 2010.

“Less than $30,000 in spending for ads on Facebook and Instagram paid for primarily in US dollars, UK pounds, Canadian dollars, and euros. We have not completed our review of the organic content coming from these accounts,” said Facebook.

The suspected Pages hosted eight events. “Up to 210 people expressed interest in at least one of these events. We cannot confirm whether any of these events actually occurred,” said Gleicher.

According to Yoel Roth, Head of Site Integrity at Twitter, they identified and suspended a very small number of accounts originating from Bangladesh for engaging in coordinated platform manipulation.

“The Tweets were entirely in Bengali and focused on regional political themes,” he wrote in a separate blog post.

Twitter also identified and suspended 2,617 additional malicious originated in Iran.

Twitter has suspended a total of 3,843 accounts from Russia.

“Our ongoing efforts have uncovered an additional 418 accounts. We cannot render definitive attribution to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) for these accounts, although most appear to originate in Russia,” said Twitter.

It also said it removed 764 accounts located in Venezuela, where there was major political upheaval.

“Additionally, we have removed 1,196 accounts located in Venezuela which appear to be engaged in a state-backed influence campaign targeting domestic audiences,” said the micro-blogging platform.

Twitter announced the new measure through its official safety account by saying that it will not allow any attempts to manipulate or disrupt its service, which came shortly before the US midterm elections are to take place on November 6, Xinhua news agency reported.

“You can now specify what type of spam you’re seeing when you report, including fake accounts,” Twitter Safety@TwitterSafety said in a tweeted post on Wednesday.

Twitter will allow users to flag tweets as originating from a fake account or a bot which are impersonating as something or someone else, and mark them as “fake”.

The new tool unveiled by Twitter is the latest step that the social media site has taken to combat malicious activities on its platform.

Twitter said in July that it had purged about 70 million accounts in May and June of this year for conducting spamming or malicious behaviour.

The “Gandhi Emoji” was officially launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the micro-blogging site, which features a caricature of the Father of the Nation.

“Users in India and across the world can use the “Gandhi Emoji” by using the hashtags #GandhiJayanti, #MKGandhi, #BapuAt150, #MahatmaGandhi, #MyGandhigiri, #MahatmaAt150, #NexusOfGood, among others,” Twitter India in a statement.

The emoji will be live until October 8. It is available on both Twitter and Twitter Lite.

The micro-blogging site has also celebrated India’s Independence Day, Republic Day, Diwali and International Day of Yoga with customized emojis.

As platform manipulation tactics continue to evolve, the micro-blogging platform said it is expanding rules to better reflect how it identifies fake accounts and what types of inauthentic activity violate its guidelines before the US mid-term elections in November.

“Some of the factors that we will take into account when determining whether an account is fake include use of stock or stolen avatar photos, use of stolen or copied profile bios and use of intentionally misleading profile information, including profile location,” said Del Harvey, Vice President, Trust and Safety, Twitter, in a blog post.

“We are expanding our enforcement approach to include accounts that deliberately mimic or are intended to replace accounts we have previously suspended for violating our rules,” she added.

Twitter has also expanded the criteria for when it will take action on accounts which claim responsibility for a hack, which includes threats and public incentives to hack specific people and accounts.

“In August, we removed approximately 50 accounts misrepresenting themselves as members of various state Republican parties,” informed Yoel Roth, Head of Site Integrity at Twitter.

“We have also taken action on Tweets sharing media regarding elections and political issues with misleading or incorrect party affiliation information,” he added.

In August, Twitter removed 770 accounts engaging in coordinated behavior which appeared to originate in Iran.

“Our automated detections continue to identify and challenge millions of potentially spammy and automated accounts per week. In the first half of September, we challenged an average of 9.4 million accounts each week,” said Roth.

Twitter is also witnessing a decline in the average number of spam-related reports it receives from users each day — from an average of approximately 17,000 per day in May to approximately 16,000 per day in September.

For the last three months, the micro-blogging platform has been developing a new policy to address dehumanizing language that makes someone less than human, Twitter said late on Tuesday.

“Some of this content falls within our hateful conduct policy (which prohibits the promotion of violence against or direct attacks or threats against other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, religious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease).

“But there are still Tweets many people consider to be abusive, even when they do not break our rules.

“Better addressing this gap is part of our work to serve a healthy public conversation,” Vijaya Gadde and Del Harvey from Twitter said in a blog post.

Many scholars have already examined the relationship between dehumanization and violence.

Twitter is now asking its 336 million users to give feedback on this to ensure how this policy may impact different communities and cultures.

“For languages not represented on our platform, our policy team is working closely with local non-governmental organizations and policymakers to ensure their perspectives are captured,” said the blog post.

The users would have time till October 9 to provide Twitter with feedback on the new policy.

“We’re experimenting with a new way to write and roll-out policy and rules. Let us know what you think,” tweeted CEO Jack Dorsey.