Islamic extremists turn to Twitter for recruiting, propaganda. As NATO forces battle the Taliban on the ground in Afghanistan, they’re engaging with militants on Twitter as well.
"The Taliban was in a Twitter fight with the ISAF's [International Security Assistance Force] Twitter account on a number of occasions," Aaron Zelin, a researcher for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told McClatchy Newspapers reporter Hannah Allam. There are few better ways than Twitter to quickly share a message among a large number of people. Islam extremists are among those using the community to spread their message and find new members. For extremists, one of the benefits of using Twitter as opposed to message boards, YouTube, or Facebook is that Twitter doesn’t actively monitor content. Inflammatory tweets can be spread rapidly before they’re removed, but the extremists have avoided attention because they don’t appear to be using their Twitter accounts to explicitly rile others.
Mitt Romney fake Twitter followers: Who's buying them? Screenshot.
Mutual relations on Twitter. About this Study. Twitter has become a new way to communicate with world leaders and a way for these leaders to communicate with each other.
On the one hand it allows heads of state and government to broadcast their daily activities and government news to an ever-growing audience, on the other, it allows citizens direct access to their leaders. Anyone can @mention a world leader on Twitter. Whether the world leader answers is another question, although a select few do actually reply to their followers’ @mentions. “Life is tweet”, former UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott recently wrote in The Guardian: “Twitter has given me a voice and a connection to millions of people that the distorted prism of the mainstream media denied.” Indeed, a few world leaders use Twitter precisely to debunk false information and correct media reports. Twitter reaches half a billion accounts — More than 140 millions in the U.S. Geolocation analysis of Twitter accounts and tweets by Semiocast Paris, France — July, 30th 2012 — Semiocast's latest study reveals Twitter reached the half billion accounts mark in June 2012, including more than 140 million in the U.S. alone.
User-base growth is slowing in Japan and Korea, yet Japan remains one of the most active countries. In June 2012, the top three cities by number of tweets were Jakarta, Tokyo and London. Semiocast has analyzed 517 million of Twitter user profiles created before July 1st 2012 as well as a sample of 1.058 billion public tweets posted from June 1st to June 30th 2012.
Drawing from its experience with previous studies, Semiocast used its proprietary platform, databases and tools to process user profiles in order to determine the location of each user using all available information: free-form location declared in user profile, time zone, language used to post tweets and GPS coordinates for the very few concerned tweets. Is Twitter a publisher or a distributor? There’s a crucial difference. There are a whole host of issues raised by the case of Guy Adams, the British journalist whose Twitter account was recently suspended and then reinstated — including the potential clash between Twitter’s desire to forge commercial partnerships with media entities like NBC and its commitment to free speech.
But the kind of behavior that Twitter engaged in by banning Adams also raises some other important issues for the company: as it expands its media ambitions and does more curation and manual filtering of the kind it has been doing for NBC, Twitter is gradually transforming itself from a distributor of real-time information into a publisher of editorial content, and that could have serious legal ramifications. To recap, Twitter suspended Adams’ account several days ago because he posted the email address of an NBC executive as part of a stream of tweets criticizing the broadcast network and its Olympics coverage. Twitter May Have 500M+ Users But Only 170M Are Active, 75% On Twitter’s Own Clients. Yesterday Paris-based analytics firm Semiocast noted that Twitter had passed the 500 million user account mark, with some detail on how that is playing out on a country-by-country basis.
Today, we have some numbers that spell out what that actually means in terms of active Twitter users. Paul Guyot, the founder of Semiocast, says its analysis indicate that on average, less than one-third, 27%, of Twitter’s user base is active — in other words, only around 170 million people, and possibly less at the moment. The numbers come from research Semiocast conducted earlier this year, Guyot notes. That study, from January, found that the Netherlands had the highest proportion of active users, at 33%, with Japan following closely behind at 30%. As you can see in the list below, there doesn’t appear to be a clear trend in active users directly related to how developing/mature each market is.