Kiran Upadhyay

A few hours after announcing a review of its verification program, Twitter began revoking the verified status of some accounts. White supremacists Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler are among the users who no longer have a blue checkmark displayed on their profiles. On Wednesday, Twitter admitted in a thread on its support account that “verification has long been perceived as an endorsement,” something its critics have argued for years about the program, which began in 2009 to prevent impersonation accounts. The problem was compounded last year when the verification program opened to allow public submissions. Twitter said yesterday that it has stopped accepting public submissions as it reviews the program and “remove(s) verification from accounts whose behavior does not fall within these new guidelines.” Its updated rules says Twitter will now remove verification for “behaviors on and off Twitter,” including promoting hate and violence; threatening people on the basis of race, et...

Twitter has a bit of a security problem. Taylor Swift, Chipotle, Newsweek — it seems each day brings another hijacked account or two. Today’s latest slip-up: Twitter’s own CFO, Anthony Noto. For about 20 minutes this morning, Noto’s account was blasting out a massive torrent of spam. It looks like the account was hijacked somewhere around 11:10 a.m. PT and recovered by 11:30. In that stretch, nearly 300 spam tweets were sent to some of Noto’s 13,000 followers. Twitter has yet to comment on how the account might have been taken over. Given that it was used for spam rather than a political message, it’s possible that this wasn’t a targeted attack, instead relying on something like an old, forgotten API key left behind on a leaky third-party service. It’s perhaps a bit revealing, though; if the company can’t keep the account of one of its own top executives locked down, what about its other 288 million active users? Note: URLs were obscured in the screenshot above to blur l...

Twitter is now keeping track of which apps you have on your phone, and sending that data back to the mothership (birds nest?) Is it the worst offense in the world? Nah — they’re not exactly perusing your browsing history and sending it to your grandmother, here. But it’s still irksome, particularly given that Twitter pitches it as something they’re doing for you but makes the whole thing opt-out instead of opt-in. (You’ll see a notification letting you know that the feature has been enabled once it goes live on your account. Scroll past it, and you’re opted in.) Fortunately, turning the whole thing off right out of the gate is pretty straight forward. Here’s how to turn it off: 1) If you haven’t seen the notification yet, turning on “Limit ad tracking” on iOS or “Opt out of interest based-ads” on Android (Accounts -> Google -> Ads) will nix the feature before it’s ever turned on. 2) If it’s already on (or you’re not sure), go to the Twitter app on your device 3) On...

After months of reports and rumors, Twitter is announcing its first commerce product. The company first signaled its interest in this area last year, when it hired former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard to lead its commerce team. Then it started recruiting other commerce specialists, and Recode got its hands on mock-ups of a Buy Now button. Over the summer, people started spotting those buttons in the wild. So Twitter is officially announcing that Buy button today — in a blog post, the company says it will be visible to “a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow over time).” As a result, users will actually be able to make purchases directly within tweets. If you see something you want, you hit “buy”, bring up a little information, enter your payment and shipping information while still Twitter (it’s encrypted and stored for future purchases), and complete the transaction “in just a few taps.” And even though the test is starting out on mobile, a company spokesperson sa...

The worst tech news I read last week was: “Twitter CFO says a Facebook-style filtered feed is coming, whether you like it or not.” The horrified firestorm of condemnation that erupted in response was the first time I’ve ever seen anything like unanimity on my Twitter feed. Fortunately, it seems it’s not actually happening. (At least not any time soon.) But for all the entirely justified denunciation of that terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea– – there is one place where Twitter really could use some algorithmic cavalry to ride to the rescue. I mean the much-maligned Discover tab, the ugly-duckling stepson of the Twitter interface, which, so far as I can tell, no serious Twitter user has ever navigated to except by mistake. I mean, I could be wrong, only Twitter knows for sure; maybe half of its audience is glued to Discover like it invented sliced bread and emoji, and they can’t wait to see what comes next; but I kind of doubt it. To date Discover has seemed a mismanage...

Back in July, Twitter launched a really nifty analytics dashboard. A bit like Google Analytics for tweets, it allows you to gauge the performance of each and every tweet you sent. How many people saw it? How many of those actually clicked your links? There was one catch, though: it was only open to advertisers and verified users. No longer! Now you too can obsess way too hard over the performance of every tweet you send! Hurray! News of the change comes from Twitter front end engineer Ian Chan: and this page lurking in Twitter’s support base confirms it: the dashboard should now be open to every account that has been open for at least 14 days, isn’t restricted/protected/suspended, and (curiously) that primarily tweets in English, French, Japanese, or Spanish. You can find the newly unlocked analytics dashboard right here.