Most of Canada to receive emergency alert test today
The federal government will test its capacity to issue emergency alerts today, with the exception of Ontario, where the test will take place on May 15.
A toxic cesspool. A lifeline. A finger on the world's pulse. Twitter is all these things and more to its over 229 million users around the world -- politicians, journalists, activists, celebrities, weirdos and normies, cat and dog lovers and just about anyone else with an internet connection.
For Elon Musk, its ultimate troll and perhaps most prolific user whose buyout of the company is on increasingly shaky ground, Twitter is a "de facto town square" in dire need of a libertarian makeover.
Whether and how the takeover will happen is anyone's guess. On Friday, Musk announced that the deal is "on hold," while tweeting that he was still "committed" to it. Earlier in the week, the billionaire Tesla CEO said he'd reverse the platform's ban of President Donald Trump if his purchase goes through. The same day, he also said he supported a new European Union law aimed at protecting social media users from harmful content. Twitter's current CEO, meanwhile, fired two top managers on Thursday.
All that said, it's been a messy few weeks for Twitter. One thing is certain: the turmoil will continue, inside and outside of the company.
"Twitter at its highest levels has always been chaos. It has always had intrigue and it has always had drama," says Leslie Miley, a former Twitter engineering manager. "This," he says, "is in Twitter's DNA."
From its 2007 start as a scrappy "microblogging service" at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, Twitter has always punched above its weight.
At a time when its rivals count their users by the billions, it has stayed small, frustrating Wall Street and making it easier for Musk to swoop in with an offer its board could not refuse.
But Twitter also wields unrivaled influence on news, politics and society thanks to its public nature, its simple, largely text-based interface and its sense of chronological immediacy.
"It's a potluck of pithy self-expression simmering with whimsy, narcissism, voyeurism, hucksterism, tedium and sometimes useful information," Associated Press technology writer Michael Liedtke wrote in a 2009 story about the company. Twitter had 27 employees at the time, and its most popular user was Barack Obama.
Today, the San Francisco icon employs 7,500 people. Obama is still its most popular account holder, followed by pop stars Justin Bieber and Katy Perry (Musk is No. 6). Twitter's rise to the mainstream can be chronicled through world events, as wars, terror attacks, the Arab Spring, the MeToo movement and other pivotal moments in our collective history played out in real time on the platform.
"Twitter often attracts thinkers. People who are thinking about things tend to be attracted to a text-based platform. And it's full of journalists. So Twitter is both a reflection of and a driver of what people are thinking about," says writer, editor and OnlyFans creator Cathy Reisenwitz, who's been on Twitter since 2010 and has over 18,000 followers.
She finds it great for discovering people and ideas and having others discover her writing and thoughts. That's why she's stayed all these years, despite harassment and death threats she's received on the platform.
Twitter users in academia, in niche fields, those with quirky interests, subcultures small and big, grassroots activists, researchers and a host of others flock to the platform. Why? Because at its best, it promises an open, free exchange of facts and ideas, where knowledge is shared, debated and questioned.
And those subcultures -- they're formidable. There's Black Twitter, feminist Twitter, baseball Twitter, Japanese cat Twitter, ER nurse Twitter and so on.
"It's enabled interest groups, especially those that are organized around social identity, whether we're talking about gender or sexuality or race, to have really important in-group dialogues," says Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor at Cornell University who studies social media.
On the flip side of Twitter's immediacy, public, open nature and 280-character (once 140-character) limit is a perfect recipe for passions to run high -- especially anger.
"The anonymity of Twitter empowers people to take shots sometimes, but it is till one of the most effective ways to communicate with people with similar interests," says Steve Phillips, a former general manager of the New York Mets who now hosts a show on MLB Network Radio.
But there's also the massive, dark part of Twitter. This is the Twitter of Nazis, of demented trolls, of conspiracy theorists and of nation states funding massive networks to influence elections.
Jaime Longoria, manager of research and training for the nonprofit Disinfo Defense League, says Musk's purchase of Twitter jeopardizes a platform that many experts believe has done a better job of reining in harmful content than its competitors.
"We're watching and waiting," Longoria says. "The Twitter we know may be over."
In a series of tweets in 2018, then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the company was committed to "collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress."
Twitter, led by its trust and safety team, has worked to improve things. It enacted new policies, added labels to false information, kicked off repeated violators of its rules against hate, inciting violence and other harmful activities. In fits and starts, things have started to improve, at least in the United States and Western Europe.
Outside Western democracies, though, not much has changed when it comes to clamping down on hate and misinformation.
"There's a lot of hate on Twitter, especially directed at minorities. And so there's always a constant battle to get Twitter to clamp down on hate speech, very often violent hate speech and fake news," says Shoaib Daniyal, associate editor with the Indian news website Scroll.
Musk's free speech absolutism, Daniyal says, doesn't make much sense in India because there have not been many curbs on speech on the platform to begin with.
"It's fairly filled with hate anyway," he says. "And Twitter hasn't done a lot about it. So let's see where it goes." Which, given Musk's mercurial nature, could be almost any direction at all.
The federal government will test its capacity to issue emergency alerts today, with the exception of Ontario, where the test will take place on May 15.
An Ontario woman said it would have been impossible to buy a house without her mother – an anecdote that animates the fact that over 17 per cent of Canadian homeowners born in the ‘90s own their property with their parents, according to a new report.
Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has made headlines with his recent arrival in the U.K., this time to celebrate all things Invictus. But upon the prince landing in the U.K., we have already had confirmation that King Charles III won't have time to see his youngest son during his brief visit.
After more than a century, Boy Scouts of America is rebranding as Scouting America, another major shakeup for an organization that once proudly resisted change.
A long-simmering feud between hip-hop superstars Drake and Kendrick Lamar reached a boiling point in recent days as the pair traded increasingly personal insults on a succession of diss tracks. Here’s a quick overview of what’s behind the ongoing beef.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
An Ontario man found out that a line of credit he thought was insured actually isn't after his wife of 50 years died.
Canadian immigrants threatened by hostile regimes are urging parliamentarians to quickly pass the 'Countering Foreign Interference Act' so they can feel safe living in their adopted home.
Spanish state prosecutors recommended Wednesday that an investigating judge shelve a probe into another alleged case of tax fraud by pop star Shakira.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.