Article Lead Image

The Tweekender: How tweets cost a car crash victim $95,000

All the notable Twitter news and stories from the past week—in 140 characters or fewer.

 

Kris Holt

Internet Culture

Posted on Jan 4, 2013   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 4:14 am CDT

With hundreds of millions of tweets per day, it’s impossible to follow everything happening on Twitter. Every Friday, the Daily Dot rounds up notable Twitter news and stories from the past week—in 140 characters or fewer.

  • Twitter is apparently worth $11 billion on private markets and may become a public company next year.

  • People in the Tokyo timezone tweeted 33,388 times per second to ring in 2013.

  • A researcher claimed Hamas was more effective than Israel at driving Twitter conversation during the sides’ November conflict in Gaza.

  • A bear that became addicted to discarded frozen meatballs has a fresh chance at life thanks to a Twitter campaign.

  • Comedian Paul F. Tompkins got bored and tweeted a bunch of sly observations about the SkyMall catalog.

  • The world’s most active city on Twitter is Jakarta, Indonesia, according to a study.

  • Lord Coe, one of the key organizers of the 2012 Olympics, thinks athletes who tweet too often are less successful.

  • Here’s a tool that shows you all the tweet-length sentences on a Web page and makes it easy to share a snippet.

  • More than 120 heads of state now use Twitter, so it’s easier than ever to tell them they’re amazing/awful/meh.

  • Damages awarded to a car crash victim were lowered by $95,000 following her tweets.

  • France’s minister of women’s rights wants a parlay with Twitter to find out how to stop hate speech.

  • Saudi activists started a petition to free a poet arrested over tweets deemed insulting to the Prophet Mohammad.

The week’s best new users: Tired of erroneous reports of her death, Megan Fox finally started tweeting. After testing the waters with the @NikeBasketball account Kobe Bryant is on Twitter for real.

Photo of the week: A man spent his last £500 on a London billboard in an effort to land a job. His photo of it has been retweeted more than 14,000 times. (@adampacitti)

Share this article
*First Published: Jan 4, 2013, 5:49 pm CST