https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/06/cia-twitter-first-tweet

Article from 2014

CIA sends out first tweet – and shows it has a sense of humour

Agency says 'we can neither confirm nor deny that this our first tweet' as it officially joins Twitter and Facebook

The US Central Intelligence Agency on Friday did something anathema to its usually secretive mission: it joined Twitter.

And the agency's first tweet was, well, snarky.

"This week, the CIA moved deeper into the world of social media with the launch of official social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook," the intelligence agency said in a statement.

Within an hour the agency had more than 50,000 followers, though it only follows 25. But first they had to deal with an imposter.

“There was someone out there impersonating CIA via Twitter. CIA filed an impersonation complaint with Twitter and they secured the @CIA account for us, which is routine for government agencies," said CIA public affairs director Dean Boyd in an email.

Regular users weren't the only ones excited to see the CIA tweeting.

The spy agency already has a mobile site, dedicated Flickr account and YouTube account.

“By expanding to these platforms, CIA will be able to more directly engage with the public and provide information on CIA’s mission, history, and other developments,” said CIA Director John Brennan, in a statement. “We have important insights to share, and we want to make sure that unclassified information about the Agency is more accessible to the American public that we serve, consistent with our national security mission.”

The agency plans to share career information, information from the agency's "World Factbook," statements, and artefacts from the CIA museum, "the best museum most people never get to see."

>>5781386

Tweets from Article

What an interesting hash used by New York FBI….

>>5781421

Ha Interesting!

>>5781673

Double meanings.

https://qz.com/862072/jack-dorsey-asked-edward-snowden-how-to-fix-twitter-twtr-heres-what-he-suggested/

edward snowden jack dorsey

Periscope/Pardon Snowden

Snowden’s two cents on Twitter.

BROKEN WINGS

Jack Dorsey asked Edward Snowden how to fix Twitter. Here’s what he suggested

By Ananya BhattacharyaDecember 13, 2016

For Edward Snowden, who is currently seeking asylum in Moscow, Twitter is one of the few connections that still exists to the public around the world.

On Dec. 13, the Pardon Snowden campaign organized a Q&A session between Twitter’s chief executive officer Jack Dorsey and Snowden over Twitter-owned video broadcasting site Periscope. The conversation initially meandered around Snowden’s well-documented exposé of mass surveillance by the US government. Then, Dorsey asked Snowden to try his hand at another hard-to-crack dilemma: how to fix Twitter.

“What would you like to see us do? What would you like to see us improve?” Dorsey asked.

Snowden, like the rest of us, is frustrated by some of Twitter’s features. He wasn’t shy about sharing them.

First, he highlighted the micro-blogging platform’s frustrating character constraints. “The fact that when you add a picture to a tweet, you lose 22 characters, that’s painful,” Snowden said about how Twitter previously functioned. He applauded Twitter for remedying that—since September, the platform has excluded photos, gifs, videos, polls and quoted tweets from the 140 character limit.

The former CIA employee suggested Twitter work harder to stop users from leaving the app window. “The clicking-through actions don’t work. it breaks the user experience there,” Snowden said, referring to how third-party webpages open up in your browser whenever you click on a link to an article. “People don’t like seeing the window change.” Drawing from Facebook’s Instant Articles, Twitter could offer a solution integrated in its main app.

There’s another page Twitter should take out of Facebook’s playbook: the ability to tweak tweets after they’ve gone out into the world. After Kim Kardashian personally emailed Dorsey about a similar feature, the microblogging platform argued that it was an impossibly bad idea. “The challenge is that you embed tweets, people retweet you everywhere,” then-head of product Kevin Weil said in Oct. 2015. “You wouldn’t want a world where somebody said something, you retweeted it—so it came from you, essentially you are representing their content—then suddenly they change it.”

Snowden’s solution? An “edited” tag that lets you view previous iterations of a tweets. (Once gain, à la Facebook.)

After the one-hour conversation had concluded, Snowden took to Twitter to make one more all-important suggestion. True to his anti-surveillance spirit, Snowden requested disappearing private messages:

Regulators Are Putting Unicorn Valuations Under the Microscope

By Daniel Roberts November 18, 2015

When you look at a hot tech startup’s list of investors, it’s usually populated by Silicon Valley VC firms, well-known names like Andreessen Horowitz, or SV Angel. But Fidelity Investments has become one of the most active investors in private tech startups. And recently, reports have surfaced that Fidelity has quietly marked down the value of its shares in a number of the hottest “unicorns.”

Now federal regulators will reportedly examine just how mutual funds go about valuing private shares in these companies.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission has been poking around at the largest funds, asking how they value their startup shares and whether the process is fair. They want to determine, the Journal writes, “whether U.S. mutual funds have proper procedures in place to accurately price shares of private technology companies amid signs the tech boom is wavering.”

The boom may not just be wavering—some believe it is a bubble set to burst. As Fortune has reported this month, Fidelity has marked down the value of its stakes in unicorns like Snapchat (previously valued at $16 billion), Dropbox ($10 billion), and Zenefits ($4.5 billion), and in startups fast approaching unicorn status like Dataminr, Blue Bottle, and NJOY. And it isn’t just Fidelity that has reassessed its unicorn investments: T. Rowe Price and The Hartford, our own Dan Primack reports, have done the same: The former marked down Evernote, and The Hartford marked down DraftKings.

Tech startups looking for their valuations to continue ballooning—which, of late, has been the game—may be regretting taking investments from mutual funds. But the ongoing investigation may change things. Mutual funds continue to report different prices for the same private companies, and this inconsistency will be a key part of the SEC’s close inquiry into this process.

Fidelity and the SEC both declined to comment for this story.

http://fortune.com/2015/11/18/mutual-funds-unicorns/