Twitter | TechPresident

With Battle of the Moms, Romney Campaign Opens New Doors On Twitter

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, April 12 2012

Twitter became ground zero for the 2012 general election campaign on Thursday after Hilary Rosen a prominent Democrat, sparked off a firestorm with her suggestion on CNN Wednesday night that Ann Romney, who remained at home to raise her five sons, hadn't "worked a day in her life."

But the comment also created a new opportunity not only for Republicans, who have been looking to turn the Democrats' "War on Women" campaign theme around to their advantage, but also for the Romney campaign to start engaging more actively online with women as Ann Romney finally established a Twitter account to voice her thoughts.

U.S. Ambassador To China Discusses Open Communications, Open Government At China's Search Giant Baidu

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, April 2 2012

Baidu International Communications Director Kaiser Kuo, Baidu Bear and U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke at Baidu in Beijing, China.

Social media is an integral part of U.S. diplomacy in China, said the U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke on Friday during a townhall meeting with the employees of China's most popular search engine Baidu. The comment ... Read More

Rick Santorum's Campaign Raises Eyebrows With Thank You E-Mails To Those Who Didn't Donate

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, April 2 2012

Rick Santorum's presidential campaign raised a few eyebrows recently when several people received e-mails thanking them for their financial donations to the campaign -- even though they hadn't contributed a dime. The ... Read More

Romney's Effort To Connect With Wisconsin Voters Meets With Derision From Democrats On Twitter

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, March 29 2012

Mitt Romney’s latest effort to make a joke at his own expense provided ample fodder on Wednesday for a Democratic snipefest on Twitter around the hashtag #RomneyAnecdotes. The former governor of Massachusetts on ... Read More

House Subcommittee Approves Global Online Freedom Act

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, March 27 2012

Image: WIRED/Wikimedia Commons

A House subcommittee on human rights voted on Tuesday to approve a bill that seeks to promote the notion of global "Internet freedom" by blocking the export of U.S. technologies that overseas regimes would use primarily ... Read More

FIRST POST: To Your Health

BY Miranda Neubauer | Friday, March 23 2012

Image: Shutterstock

Today's news: A look at what the Obama team is doing online to publicize the impact of the Affordable Healthcare Act as it heads to the Supreme Court; the Federal Communications Commission is working with ISPs on the steps they should take to fight botnets; A re-design of New York City's 911 emergency call system is $1 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule, the Massachusetts State Treasurer and a former campaign trail opponent fight over his Facebook page, and more. Read More

Republicans in Congress More Effective on Twitter, Study Finds

BY Miranda Neubauer | Thursday, March 22 2012

Image: Shutterstock

Congressional Republicans use Twitter more effectively than Congressional Democrats, according to a political analysis of Twitter conducted by Edelman and Simply Measured. The study analyzed 456 Congressional Twitter handles from September to December 2011. Read More

Pew: Americans Accessing More News Through Their Mobile Devices; Social Media A Small But Growing Driver Of Traffic

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, March 19 2012

Photo: Flickr/Byrion

The news industry is still trying to find its financial footing in an über-networked world, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in ... Read More

Republican National Committee Uses #ObamaonEmpty To Fuel Attacks On Obama's Energy Policy

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, March 15 2012

Republicans accelerated their rhetorical assaults against President Obama on Thursday, hitting him hard in speeches and online over gas prices as those prices rise, and Obama’s poll numbers go down. The Republican ... Read More

Split by SouthWest: My SXSW 2012 Diary

BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, March 15 2012

danah boyd and Alex Howard at SXSW 2012 (Photo by Micah L. Sifry)

PDM editorial director Micah L. Sifry spent last Friday through Monday at South by SouthWest Interactive, attending panels, keynotes and hanging out. Here's his report: SXSW is still a place where sessions packed with thousands of attendees cheer for the iconoclasts and the game-changers. It is also much more of a business networking conference than an internet futurists' playpen. In short, it has a split personality. Read More

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Chilean Anti-Corruption Resource: A Crowdsourced Database of Social and Political Connections

In countries where a small minority of social circles have a majority of the political and economic power, personal relationships can affect major decision-making, a serious concern of anti-corruption activists. A new web platform stores personal profiles of key players in Chilean business and politics, complete with biographies and personal and professional connections through family, education, social circles, employers and coworkers, to make tracking social relationships and conflict-of-interest easier. Called Poderopedia (from the Spanish word for power), the project sounds kind of like LinkedIn, but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.

Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens

Mobily, an arm of the state-owned Middle Eastern telecom giant Etihad Etisalat, has been accused of working with Saudi Arabia to develop software that would allow the government to bypass protections for social media users. The exposé comes from Moxie Marlinspike (neé Matthew Rosenfield), an expert in a certain type of malicious Internet attack called MITM (man-in-the-middle), whereby attackers intercept and secretly alter private messages exchanged via email and other social media platforms. GO

Saudi Religious Leader Warns Twitter Users of Consequences in the Afterlife

In late March, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric said Twitter was for clowns and corrupters. Earlier this week, he said anyone using social media, in particular Twitter, “has lost this world and the afterlife.” His comments might be laughable, if they did not come at a time when the Saudi government is looking into monitoring or blocking social media sites and eliminating user anonymity.

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What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform legislation supported in Silicon Valley. "We're going to create a virtual digital storm," said Jeremy Robbins in a Wednesday ... GO

The New Yorker Hopes "Strongbox" Is a Wiretap-Proof Sieve for Leaks

The New Yorker yesterday became the first outlet to implement DeadDrop, a new system for sources to submit information to journalists online in a more secure and anonymous way than, for example, email. GO

Female Organizer of Pakistan's First Hackathon Stresses Collaboration Over Competition

After Pakistan banned Valentine's Day this year, Sabeen Mahmud started an online protest in which people uploaded photos to mock the government ban. In the weeks following she received death threats and menacing phone calls, and early on she had to stay home from work. That did nothing, however, to keep her from further organizing. Last month, the café she started in Karachi hosted Pakistan's first ever hackathon, which tackled problems including sanitation, crime, disaster management, and education. She even invited a government representative to observe the initial conversations, tackling sensitive areas like government inefficiency and elections.

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White House Innovation Fellows Project Spins Off Into A Business

Clay Johnson and Adam Becker joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to help the White House fix the way government does business. Now they're turning that mission into a business themselves. GO

Fighting Fires With Data, New York City Launches New Safety Inspection System

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies. GO

Chinese Netizens Use Digital Initiative to Gain Media Attention for Unsolved Poisoning Case

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition to the U.S. President.

PDF France 2013: “Au Code, Citoyens!”

This year PDF France will take place in Paris on June 13, with the theme "Au Code, Citoyens!" ("To Code, Citizens!") The speakers' lineup includes some of the continent's leaders in the digital revolution. GO

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Website Imitation is Flattery in New York City Council Race

A New York City Council candidate who had made his name as a technology consultant and spearheaded an open government initiative several years ago found parts of his website copied by another City Council candidate in a different borough, as Politicker first reported. GO

Mike Honda Locks Up Establishment Support, But Challenger Has Ear of the Silicon Valley Elite

Some of Silicon Valley's most influential business people will hold a fundraiser in San Francisco this Thursday for Ro Khanna, the 36-year-old lawyer who's challenging 71-year-old California Democrat Mike Honda for his 17th Congressional District seat. The names at the top of the invite: Ron Conway and Sean Parker. They're apparently forming a committee to help Khanna build his campaign. The other bold-face names who are listed as part of the 'committee in formation' include Salesforce.com's Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Benchmark Capital General Partners' Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton, tech entrepreneur Shawn Fanning, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, her big data venture investor husband Zach Bogue, and Conway's SV Angel colleague, Founder and Managing Partner David Lee. GO

Tools to Keep Independent Media Online in Hostile Environments

Websites and media outlets in developing countries or countries with corrupt or repressive regimes struggle daily to fend off hacker attacks, some from their own government — like the Malaysian news portal Sarawak Report, which techPresident reported was taken down in April by sustained denial-of-service attacks. The negative attention controversial reporting draws can scare local advertisers away as well, making it difficult for a media company to support itself. Media Frontiers offers two services to websites dealing with either of those problems.

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Ahead of September Elections, German Pirate Party Picks Its Platform

The German Pirate Party held its election year convention over the weekend and approved its party platform, following lengthy debate over the role that online decision-making should have within the party, as German news sources reported and the party outlined on its own web platforms. GO

Peruvians Petition their President to Stick Up for their Digital Rights

Peru’s civil society advocacy groups have started an online petition outlining their ‘non-negotiable’ demands for digital rights and freedom of speech. The campaign was prompted by the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Lima, Peru, will soon host the 17th round of secretive TPP trade talks, which will take place from May 15 – 24.

Gun Control Advocates Take Aim At LivingSocial for Promoting Guns and Alcohol

A coalition of advocacy groups is launching a new campaign this week against the promotion of American gun culture. The campaign focuses on the daily deals site Living Social, which hasn't stopped promoting social events Hunter S. Thompson would have loved (they promote shooting off guns and letting off steam and drinking.) GO

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