Tag: twitter

ISIS: They May Hate Us but They Thrive on Our Stuff

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Like most of us, I don’t think I’ve felt like this since 9/11, although Paris may feel scary in a different way because the scope and savvy of ISIS makes Al Qaeda look primitive in comparison.

I spend hours on the Web every day, and probably understand the reach, creativity and strategic smarts of ISIS outreach more than most of my peers.  It’s kind of amazing that people committed to such a regressive lifestyle are so adept at using modern methods to build it.  They’ve been using Twitter, Whatsapp and other basic tools for some time but even though I raised two gamers, it never occurred to me until I heard it this morning that online game consoles are great, almost invisible, ISIS communication tools.

There have been hints though, in our popular culture. Portraits of these tactics have appeared  in TV shows as disparate in audience as NCIS and The Good Wife: plots about the online recruiting American teenagers for homegrown violence and about exploiting western commitment to privacy and free speech and thought, as well as the seemingly insurmountable gap between the world that nurtures these terrorists and the world we have tried to create for our own kids.

Of course, that dissonance means nothing if your goal is to return us all to a particularly fierce, and very old, version of holiness.  It’s so sad to note, too, that our wonderful technology is once again taking us away from all we’d hope it would be.

 

Kevin Spacey, David Letterman, Twitter and Moms Rising – All in One Post!!!

OK so I’m in London and a friend posts this on my Facebook page.  And I should be telling you more about London and that we’re leaving for Paris this afternoon (on theEurostar!!) for the weekend but this is just fun.

ALSO on that same Facebook page though, from Moms Rising, is this:
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner “…we are now lagging behind the rest of the world in closing the gender gap. According to the World Economic Forum, the US ranks 31st of 128 countries overall, but 76th in educational attainment, 36th in health and survival, 69th in political empowerment, and 70th for wage equality for similar work. In the representation of women in our Congress, we rank 71st.”


Reps. Maloney, Biggert reintroduce Equal Rights Amendment

So when you’re finished laughing at Kevin and Dave, think what we can do about these devastating numbers! I’ve just gone to work at Causes Managing Editor at Care2 and we have an active women’s rights section there – and we all know plenty of other places to raise some hell.  Somehow, seeing it all aggregated like this makes it worse, no?

VOTER SUPPRESSION: A REAL WAY TO HELP — TWITTER AND ALLIES FIND A WAY

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When votes are mangled on election day, when people are turned away, or misled, or intimidated; when names have been purged without notice or challenged illegally, it’s very tough to protect the outcome because it’s so hard to get to the site of the violation in time to fix it before voters give up.  At least it’s always been that way.  And because older machines go to poor, minority precincts, and because mean-spirited efforts to defraud less sophisticated voters often affect Democrats disproportionately, as reported in Rolling Stone, any effort that gets help where it needs to be faster and more effectively can make a big difference not only for for Obama but also for down-ballot races.

A crew of some of the coolest nerds on the Web have come together to harness Twitter and other tools to help.  It’s really simple; you can tweet (or text) violations, line lengths and other info, and use "hash tags" (these  #) so that people following the issue will receive the message on their Twitter readers and send help.  If you don’t want to bother with Twitter, text to 66937 and start your message with “#votereport."  (That’s a "hash tag" — see how simple?)   Bloggers like Nancy Walzman at PoliticsWest, who is based in Colorado where there’s much at stake, and Nancy Scola and Alison Fine at TechPresident can give you more details.  Our vigilance can really make a difference.

Just for fun, here’s a diagram of how it works.  Basically though, you just text or Tweet this the same way you do anything else.  And you should.  I also want to renew my plea (easy for me to say since I’m not a lawyer) for you to make yourself available on election day to protect the process, every committed voter, and, as far as I’m concerned, our country.

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C-SPAN HOSTS CAMPAIGN DEBATE, TWITTER/BLOG “TIME CAPSULE”

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If you were watching C-SPAN at all during the conventions you probably remember the reports from Leslie Bradshaw, who was one of the senior editors of the "Convention Hub," which ran tons of blog posts and tweets and sorted wheat from chaff.  It also let you pull video from C-SPAN archives to insert into blog posts.  Now, Leslie tells me (full disclosure, she is my friend) that they are doing the same for each debate- four sites in all.  They announced the plan on C-SPAN on Friday but I was unable to post about it until now.
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Given the live-blogging madness that has overtaken all of us during big speeches, and the high interest the debates are certain to generate – this seems to me a good thing.  So I’m passing the word to you.  Here are the main points (Oh and that’s Leslie next to Susan Swain on C-Span during the conventions):

1. The four sites will launch later this week.
2.  Each website will be a "time capsule" complete with blog posts, tweets, transcripts and video from each debate.
3.  They will also tracking twitter posts with: #debate08, Palin, McCain, Biden and Obama
4.  C-SPAN is also very active, and very popular, on Twitter. 
    

I got majorly addicted to these hubs during the conventions and you’ll love them.  You can also submit your own posts, and they will read them and often include them in the crawl.  So, later this week, check it out for yourself.