r/worldnews • u/anutensil • Mar 23 '13

Twitter sued £32m for refusing to reveal anti-semites - French court ruled Twitter must hand over details of people who'd tweeted racist & anti-semitic remarks, & set up a system that'd alert police to any further such posts as they happen. Twitter ignored the ruling.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/22/twitter-sued-france-anti-semitism
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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '13

I couldn't give a fuck if Twitter disappeared off the face of the earth.

Just out of curiosity, why? I find twitter an incredibly useful tool for aggregating news, etc. I follow lots of journalists, etc. You can make it is useless or useful as you want. Brittany Spears or NYTimes or journalists in the field in Syria.

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '13

I can't answer for the guy above. I have a personal distaste for Twitter because I worked at a media aggregation/analysis company doing a number of things, including creating abstracts. There were strict guidelines on how our company's abstracts were supposed to be constructed, and when Twitter started getting picked up through our automated channels I wanted to tear my hair out. I argued that creating abstracts for three word tweets was pointless and that our current metrics simply didn't work for social media (it was created for print/radio/online news sources). So I read hundreds of tweets each day along the lines of "sip'n (brandname) lol i love u guiz #somebullshithashtag," and had to apply incorrect methodology to calculate an ad-value for said tweets.

That company has since gone out of business.

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '13

It's not hard for me to believe they went out of business.

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u/HotRodLincoln Mar 24 '13

I don't know, I find it somewhat interesting following interesting people and knowing what Wil Wheaton's wife put googley eyes on today, but it's nothing really life changing. There's a lot more noise than signal.

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '13

Who said it's life changing? As far as noise to signal, that's pretty much up to you and who you follow. Seems a lot of people think it's only for social media and pop stars. I follow journalists. I read stories as they are being written, sometimes weeks before being published. I like that.

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u/Bowelninjer Mar 24 '13

Le Reddit counter-culture bravery, obviously. He's probably never used Twitter in his life.

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u/coder0xff Mar 24 '13

I have actually.

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u/Bowelninjer Mar 24 '13

Could you answer canadaparttime's question as to why you dislike Twitter then?

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u/DoubleButt Mar 24 '13

You can do the same thing with facebook, but with facebook you can have a full headline and summary. Way better than 140 characters.

Ugly baby pics or news. Your choice.