Feel Train was a technology cooperative co-founded by Courtney Stanton and Darius Kazemi and based in Portland, Oregon. It closed at the end of 2019. [1]
Feel Train was a worker-owned cooperative. Stanton and Kazemi were its first two worker-owners, and the organization was chartered to allow a maximum of eight employees, each with equal salary, equal share in the company and equal firing power over others, including the founders. [2]
Feel Train projects included the Stay Woke Bot, [3] [4] a Twitter bot developed in collaboration with activists DeRay Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe, [5] and Shortcut, an app developed with radio program This American Life to facilitate sharing audio clips across social media, similar to the way gifs allow video clips to be shared. [6] Feel Train is also developing a Twitter bot based on the Obama Social Media Archive called Relive 44, which beginning in May 2017 will repost, eight years later, every tweet from President Barack Obama (whose first tweet came in May 2009.) [7]
Christopher Reaves Messina is an American blogger, product consultant and speaker who is the inventor of the hashtag as it is currently used on social media platforms. In a 2007 tweet, Messina proposed vertical/associational grouping of messages, trends, and events on Twitter by the means of hashtags. The hashtag was intended to be a type of metadata tag that allowed users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging, which made it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific digger theme or content. It allowed easy, informal markup of folksonomy without need of any formal taxonomy or markup language. Hashtags have since been referred to as the "eavesdroppers", "wormholes", "time-machines", and "veins" of the Internet.
How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
Twitter, rebranding to X since July 2023, is an online social media and social networking service operated by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc. On Twitter, registered users can post texts, images and videos. Users can post (tweet), like, repost, comment and quote posts, and direct message other registered users. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its application programming interfaces (APIs).
Social television is the union of television and social media. Millions of people now share their TV experience with other viewers on social media such as Twitter and Facebook using smartphones and tablets. TV networks and rights holders are increasingly sharing video clips on social platforms to monetise engagement and drive tune-in.
The term twitter bomb or tweet bomb refers to posting numerous Tweets with the same hashtags and other similar content, including @messages, from multiple accounts, with the goal of advertising a certain meme, usually by filling people's Tweet feeds with the same message, and making it a "trending topic" on Twitter. This may be done by individual users, fake accounts, or both.
Barack Obama won the 2008 United States presidential election on November 4, 2008. During campaign, by using social media and mobilizing the general public online, Obama was able to raise awareness and financial support of his campaign through the use of over 15 social networking sites.
A Twitter bot is a type of software bot that controls a Twitter account via the Twitter API. The social bot software may autonomously perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts. The automation of Twitter accounts is governed by a set of automation rules that outline proper and improper uses of automation. Proper usage includes broadcasting helpful information, automatically generating interesting or creative content, and automatically replying to users via direct message. Improper usage includes circumventing API rate limits, violating user privacy, spamming, and sockpuppeting. Twitter bots may be part of a larger botnet. They can be used to influence elections and in misinformation campaigns.
Vine was an American short-form video hosting service where users could share six-second-long looping video clips. It was originally launched on January 24, 2013, by Vine Labs, Inc. Bought by Twitter, Inc. in 2012 before its launch, the service was shut down on January 17, 2017, and the app was discontinued a few months later.
Andrew Kaczynski is an American journalist and a political reporter for CNN. He became well known in 2011 by posting old video clips of politicians, often of them making statements contrary to their current political positions, to YouTube. He was described as "the [2012] Republican primaries' most influential amateur opposition researcher".
The history of X can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.
Stephanie Foo is a Malaysia-born American radio journalist, producer and author. She has worked for Snap Judgment and This American Life. In 2022, she published What My Bones Know, a memoir about healing from complex PTSD.
Paul Joseph Watson is a British far-right YouTuber, radio host, and conspiracy theorist. Until July 2016, Watson embraced the label "alt-right", but he now identifies as part of the New Right. In May 2019, Facebook and Instagram permanently banned Watson for violation of hate speech policies.
Brittany N. Packnett Cunningham is an American activist and the co-founder of Campaign Zero. She was a member of President Barack Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She was previously executive director for Teach for America in St. Louis, Missouri.
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial justice, sexism and LGBT rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
Darius Kazemi is an American computer programmer and artist. Kazemi and Courtney Stanton are the co-founders of the technology collective Feel Train.
Donald Trump's use of social media attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in May 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers. On November 19, 2022, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated his account, although Trump has stated he will not use it in favor of his own social media, Truth Social. The first tweet since 2021 was made in August 2023 about his mugshot from Fulton County Jail, but the account has since remained inactive.
The 2017 Macron e-mail leaks were leaks of more than 20,000 e-mails related to the campaign of Emmanuel Macron during the 2017 French presidential elections, two days before the final vote. The leaks garnered an abundance of media attention due to how quickly news of the leak spread throughout the Internet, aided in large part by bots and spammers and drew accusations that the government of Russia under Vladimir Putin was responsible. The e-mails were shared by WikiLeaks and several American alt-right activists through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and 4chan.
The use of social media in political campaigning was made popular by Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential elections and the impact of social media in deciding the 2008 presidential elections was evident in the research and analysis produced. The 2008 elections and 2012 elections exist in different landscapes, during the 2008 elections Obama's campaign was considered "an experimental innovator" but by 2012 the merits of social media had been repeatedly proven.
Leslie MacFadyen, known professionally as Leslie Mac, is an American activist and community organizer. She is a co-founder of the Ferguson Response Network, the co-creator of the Safety Pin Box monthly subscription service, and has created multiple digital campaigns such as #PayBlackWomen and #SlaveryWithASmile.