Bridget Coyne, digital director for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sean Evins, a staffer on the House Administration Committee, are moving to the Twitter Government and Politics team, according to a tweet from @gov. Politico had reported Evins' move last week. He told Politico Influence that he would be "acting as a liaison between Twitter and elected officials and helping them better communicate with their constituents." Read More

A Conservative British member of Parliament who has recently had some trouble with trolls on the web and on Twitter has co-founded a new social network to discuss politics. Conservative MP Louise Mensch is working with Luke Bozier, who worked for Tony Blair as head of digital communications at the headquarters of the Labour Party and and founded the local government utility municpo.com, on the new website, "menshn." Read More

The National Republican Congressional Committee's latest gambit for media attention involved a live feed of a printer as it churned out paper with the names of people who signed an online petition to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Looks like it may have worked too well. Over at Threat Level, David Kravets writes that pranksters started submitting bogus names ranging from "hello twitter" and "HelpI'mStuckInthisPrinter" to names less printable in family-friendly quarters of the Internet. Read More

The GOP new media machine tries to chase the spotlight anywhere it goes online, even going so far as to famously jump in on hashtags used by the White House or Obama campaign. It's just not clear what this exactly does for them. A case in point is Twitchy, a platform launched earlier this year by conservative commentator Michelle Malkin that picks out individual tweets to present on a website along with a few words of commentary. While it ventures into sports and culture news, its primary use seems to be to amplify the conservative hashtag wars, starting some fights and continuing others. Read More

Twitter has hired Sinéad McSweeney, director of communications for Garda Síochána, Ireland's national police service, as its director of public policy for Europe, according to Twitter's government account. McSweeney previously worked in the same role for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and also served as special adviser to two attorneys general, David Byrne and Michael McDowell. She will be based in the company's office in Dublin. Read More

News travels fast these days. Not only did President Barack Obama's exclusive-to-ABC-News announcement about his, um, evolved position on gay marriage leak ahead of time on Twitter — a sharp-eyed deputy social media editor at Reuters noticed a telling slug in a URL on ABC's website — but the snark cannons had been unloading, full-bore, well ahead of the moment when ABC aired Obama's sit-down interview with Robin Roberts. Read More

Computer science researcher Daniel Gayo-Avello writes in recently published research that many previous studies of Twitter's predictive power for elections have been "greatly exaggerated." Technology Review points us to Avello's recent work, a survey of studies on Twitter statistics' correlation with election data. Read More

Several Twitter accounts this weekend attempted to tweet, in real-time, the sinking of the Titanic on the 100th anniversary of the tragedy. But translating an event that happened at the advent of the telegraph into the era of the tweet is — for the detail-minded, anyway — harder than it may seem.