Will Twitter war become the new norm?

War is not just about bombs and rockets. It's about words.

That's been true for centuries, of course. But the public got a rude awakening this week about just how much those words can matter in the digital age when the Israel Defense Force live tweeted its strike that killed a Hamas leader.

Will Twitter war become the new norm?

The military's live spin about the strike, and Hamas' response on a separate Twitter feed, have been called an unprecedented use of social media. BuzzFeed wrote that it "may well be the most meaningful change in our consumption of war in over 20 years." It's raising questions about the ethics and implications of live-tweeting a violent conflict. And it's calling into question the democratic, everyone-has-a-voice nature of Twitter, which is known more for giving a voice to protesters and civilians than military spokespeople.

In this case, it seems to be giving a megaphone to the military.

"Armies and militaries and governments have done this kind of thing with radio broadcasts and whatever tools they have at their disposal," said Mathew Ingram, a senior writer for the tech site GigaOm. "What changes it is the reach and the speed" of the messages in the social media age. "Twitter and Facebook haven't reinvented communications, but they sure have changed it in some pretty important ways."

Amid fears the violence could escalate, Israel has reported three people killed and Hamas says 20 Palestinians are dead. At least 274 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel, according to the Israeli military. More than 140 strikes have hit Gaza, sources with Hamas say. Both sides say they were retaliating against the other's actions.

Tweets from the official @IDFSpokesperson account, which had about 100,000 followers on Thursday, announced an attack on Gaza and reported on its aftermath.

"The IDF has begun a widespread campaign on terror sites & operatives in the #Gaza Strip," the feed wrote on Wednesday, "chief among them #Hamas & Islamic Jihad targets."

The feed followed that up with this stark image:

And it issued warnings to Hamas:

A Twitter feed for the Izzedine al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territory of Gaza, responded to another one of the IDF's tweets this way:

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

— Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

The account, which had about 11,000 followers on Thursday, also says Israel's airstrikes are hitting civilians:

#Israel's military still targeting civilians in #Gaza kills a child and fourty others #hamas#GazaUnderAttack #Egypt

— Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

The live updates -- which include some graphic images -- also raise questions for Web companies like Twitter and Google, which owns YouTube, about what content they will allow to be posted to their sites. YouTube briefly removed a video that appeared to show an Israel strike on a car that killed a high-ranking member of Hamas. The company since has restored the video, according to a YouTube spokeswoman.

"With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call," the spokeswoman said in an e-mail to CNN. "When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it."

The video site has a policy that bans "graphic or gratuitous violence." It makes exceptions, however, for content that has documentary or news value.

Others have raised the idea that Twitter should censor the official IDF and Al Qassam Brigades feeds, since they could be viewed as inciting violence.

"This clearly puts Twitter in a difficult position. They want to preserve their position as a carrier service that doesn't editorialize," Benedict Evans, from Enders Analysis, told the BBC. "On the other hand, they have terms and conditions that must be adhered to."

Twitter did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.

More lasting than the free-speech debate at the tech companies, however, may be the fact that future conflicts will have to include live updates from official military sources, said Ingram, as armies try to spin the public in real time.

"If you're an Israeli supporter, your view is that you need to do this because you need to get the information out that you believe isn't reaching people properly because of bias in the media," Ingram said. "And presumably Palestinians believe the same thing."

That could have important ramifications.

"If the Egyptian government had been doing what the IDF is doing during the Arab Spring, it would have been a very different picture," he said, referring to the activists who used social media to organize protests that toppled Egypt's Hosni Mubarak last year. "Mostly what we got was people on the ground -- participants, dissidents -- because the Egyptian government was clueless."

These groups are not clueless when it comes to social media. But their efforts to spin the public may backfire because it can't silence other voices, said Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

Tufekci said she's having a hard time opening her Twitter timeline because it's littered with people on the ground who are posting "pictures of mangled children's dead bodies." Those photos -- and tweets from people on the ground who are experiencing the violence -- make the spin-heavy feeds from both sides of the conflict seem "hollow" and distortionist, Tufekci said.

She said it's especially jarring because the messages are stacked right on top of each other in her feed.

"I really think that the power of social media in such cases is to make real -- and very excruciatingly real, and horrifyingly real -- what war actually looks like," she said. "These (official) Twitter accounts, (from what) I've seen of IDF, they're trying to make it unreal. They're trying to spin it and have PR, and that is really not working because there are so many pictures coming out of the reality of what it looks like."

She hopes the graphic tweets will remind the public of the grave consequences for both sides. "It's not a social media war," she said. "It's a real war."

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6 ways Vine's six seconds may change Twitter

Call it the Twitterfication of social sharing.

As if it wasn't enough for Twitter to limit our bursts of inspiration to 140 written characters, it has now rolled out Vine, a video-sharing app that limits your videos to just six seconds.

What can you do with six seconds of smartphone video (which, for now, is available only on iPhones, causing an aggravated Android Nation to again wail and wait)?

Not re-enact "Lawrence of Arabia" using action figures. That would take 2,270 Vine posts, give or take. Nor can you document a successful rodeo bull ride; those require at least eight seconds.

As the tech press largely fawns over the new tool's potential, we're taking a look at some of the ways the tool might affect your Twitter feed and the Web as a whole.

And it seems only appropriate that we analyze Vine's six-second bursts in six points. Here's what Vine could do:

6 ways Vine's six seconds may change Twitter

1. Spur creativity

If, as the Bard wrote, brevity is the soul of wit, the six-second time limit could in fact inspire creativity. That's the logic behind Twitter itself, really.

Once derided by critics as an example of society's increasingly gnat-like attention span, the site's 140-character limit has in many cases inspired users to be as witty, insightful or informative as they can be in as few words as possible.

Twitter is sometimes called a "microblogging" site. Considering some of the long and winding blog posts we've read over the years, there's some value in spurring users to make their point quickly. Maybe Vine will do the same for Web video.

"My guess, given the enthusiasm for Twitter so far, is that people are going to do really cool things," Scott Klemmer, co-director of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at Stanford University, told Wired, a CNN content partner.

"One of the things we know about creativity is that constraints are essential for getting people to do creative stuff. If you come up with the right constraints, that's a benefit, not a drawback."

And here's an example:

(Of course, if you desperately need a 10-minute loop of sniveling King Joffrey from "Game of Thrones" getting slapped to a Led Zeppelin soundtrack, we've still got YouTube.)

2. Spam up your feed

A vine can be a lovely thing. Think Wrigley Field or the Ivy League. But it can also be a noxious weed.

In the first 24 hours, the primary theme of most of the Vine videos we've seen has been "Hey, I'm making a Vine video!" We're not immune from this ourselves.

That will probably change, in many cases, as creative folks fine-tune their craft. But let's be honest: Among Twitter's millions of users are a lot of people who will probably be sharing the banal and the stupid. And, if Web history holds true, clips of themselves naked.

Hopefully, you've crafted your "follow" list to keep most of these people off your screen. Otherwise, you could find yourself clicking on a lot of videos of people's food.

Which, as we all know, is what Instagram is for.

3. Turn Twitter into Facebook's video alternative

It surprisingly took a few months after Facebook bought the aforementioned Instagram, an app that lets users slap groovy-looking filters onto their photos, for it to cause a falling-out with Twitter.

Facebook pulled Twitter's ability to show Instagram images in its feed. That's reserved for FB now. You can still post them to Twitter, of course, but followers see only a link that takes them to Instagram's website.

Fair enough, we suppose. Why let a competitor reap the benefits of an app you just shelled out a reported $1 billion to buy?

So, if that makes Facebook the go-to platform for social photos, maybe Vine makes Twitter the default place for fun mini-videos. As the platform strives to turn a profit, the Vine clips may give users a new reason to linger.

4. Invite more "Oops" moments

Delete all you want. Once you tweet something, it's out there forever. Ask Chris Brown. Or Gilbert Gottfried. Or Anthony Weiner.

Put videocameras in the hands of millions, give them a platform to share the results with the rest of those millions, and bad decisions are sure to ensue. Often after a few cocktails, or if you're a celebrity.

Given a new tool with which to share, or overshare, we all can expect more Twitter missteps. Many of us can't wait.

5. Continue the rebirth of "GIFs"

OK, this one is already under way. Years after the Web gave usPeanut Butter Jelly Time, folks have rediscovered the joy of watching something quick and silly happen over and over again.

Vine builds on this idea. Your six seconds (or fewer) of video loops for as long as the viewer lets it run. This can be disconcerting and annoying. But as folks get creative, it could also be clever. The first person to re-enact "Dramatic Chipmunk" has our undying devotion. (Fun discovery: That YouTube classic is exactly six seconds long).

A Vine isn't actually a GIF (Graphic Interchange Format is the full name). But it can take advantage of the same instincts that have made GIFs an enduring Web feature.

6. Press the competition

Vine isn't the only mobile app jockeying to be the "Instagram of Video."

Viddy, Tout, SocialCam and even the ill-fated Color all wanted to become the front-runner in this emerging social field. Twitter may have shut down that argument when it acquired Vine for an undisclosed amount.

Sure, the mobile space has its share of stories in which the bantamweight manages to dance around a heavy hitter. Remember when Facebook Places was supposed to crush Foursquare?

But Vine will be sitting right there in front of Twitter's more than 140 million users. The others will need to innovate or die.

Have you seen any Vine videos you really liked, or made some of your own? Let us know in the comments.

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Twitter must identify racist, anti-Semitic posters, French court says

(CNN) -- For months now, the French-language twittersphere has lit up with a rash of racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic tweets using the hashtags #UnBonJuif (a good Jew), #SiMonFilsEstGay (if my son is gay), and #SiMaFilleRamèneUnNoir (if my daughter brings home a black guy).

Twitter must identify racist, anti-Semitic posters, French court says

Last fall, under pressure from French advocacy group Union of Jewish Students (UEJF), Twitter agreed to remove some offensive tweets. In October 2012, at Berlin's request, Twitter also suspendeda German neo-Nazi account based in the city of Hanover, the first time the company had responded to such a government request.

However, at the time, the UEJF also wanted identifying information of the perpetrators, which Twitter was not prepared to give up. So the group went to court to force the issue.

On Thursday, the Grand Instance Court in Paris ordered Twitter to identify the authors of anti-semitic tweets by creating a mechanism(Google Translate) to alert French authorities to "illegal content," on its French site "in a visible and easily-accessible [way]."

If Twitter does not comply within two weeks, the American company faces fines of €1,000 ($1,336) per day.

How "free" should "free speech" be?

This isn't the first time that French courts and laws have butted heads over idiotic racism online. Less than a year ago, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a law that would make even viewing a hate site a crime.

Here in the United States, we have a Constitutionally protected near-blanket right to free expression. Although incitement to violence is generally not protected, hate speech -- no matter how disgusting and awful -- is. As we've reported before, the operating principle in America has generally been that undesirable speech should be countered with more speech, not less.

That's not the approach taken in Europe, where hate speech is most definitely not protected. Many European Union states (and even some non-EU countries in Europe) have various types of anti-hate speech legal mechanisms, in part to head off terrorism and far-right violence.

"We're not able to identify the individuals, only Twitter can do so," Sacha Reingewirtz, UEJF's vice president, told the French broadcaster, RFI. "We've already tweeted the decision. And we see on Twitter that the decision has apparently triggered a new rise of anti-semitic messages directed against our organization, so there is still work to be done, both by us and Twitter, but we're happy the French justice is now changing the way it is."

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On Data Privacy Day, Twitter and Google focus on government requests

In 2009 the U.S government dubbed January 28 "Data Privacy Day." Four years later, it's the government's own actions to obtain personal information that are in the spotlight, thanks to new reports from Google and Twitter.

On Data Privacy Day, Twitter and Google focus on government requests

The goal of Data Privacy Day is to educate people and companies on the vulnerability of personal data, including information shared on social networks, financial data and anything stored on cloud services. The holiday is spearheaded by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), a nonprofit organization that works with government agencies and major tech companies including Intel, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

"We want to raise universal awareness about people respecting the privacy of others and safeguarding their data," said Michael Kaiser, NSCA's executive director.

To mark the occasion, Twitter released its latest transparency report, which breaks down government requests for user data as well as copyright complaints and "take down" requests. Google followed up on its own transparency report, released last week, with a blog post explaining how it fields government requests and a new section on its transparency report that addresses common questions about the process.

The numbers from the two companies show a steady increase in requests from the U.S. government for personal data. Usually these requests are part of criminal investigations or court cases, according to the two companies. The majority of requests from U.S. agencies are subpoenas, followed by search warrants, court orders and some emergency requests. Search warrants are more difficult to obtain than a subpoena and require a higher standard of probable cause.

In the past six months, Google received 21,389 requests for data, a 70% increase since the company first started releasing the report in 2010. The largest single entity requesting information continued to be the U.S. government, which submitted 8,438 of the requests. Google turned over some or all of the requested information 88 percent of the time, Twitter 57 percent of the time.

Twitter received 1,858 requests for information about 1,433 accounts, 815 of which were from the U.S. government. The social network added a new home for its transparency reports,transparency.twitter.com, and expanded the report to include more details about the requests and an expanded entry to cover the activity in the United States.

"It's our continued hope that providing greater insight into this information helps in at least two ways: first, to raise public awareness about these invasive requests; second, to enable policy makers to make more informed decisions," Twitter's legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel said in a blog post.

Transparency and education about what the government can access and how are important, but the companies also want to change the laws to better protect user privacy in the first place.

"We're a law-abiding company, and we don't want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it's just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information," said Google's chief legal officer David Drummon in a blog post on Monday.

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a file stored on a hard drive in your home has greater protection than information stored with a third-party. Whereas the government would require a search warrant for anything in your house, it can request access to e-mails older than 180 days or information stored in the cloud with a subpoena, which is easier to obtain. Twitter and Google are both members of the Digital Due Process Coalition, an organization that is lobbying to update the act.

Drummon explained Google's process for handling requests, which involves notifying users of the requests when legally allowed, and requiring a search warrant for search query and private information from agencies conducting criminal investigations.

"We believe a warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and overrides conflicting provisions in ECPA," says Drummon.

These kinds of reports and posts are important tools for educating the public about how and when government agencies can access information, but government requests are only one sliver of data privacy fluency. People can also take steps to better control what they share online on social networks or apps that collect location data. Kaiser recommends people familiarize themselves with privacy policies and regularly update privacy settings on sites such as Facebook.

The day isn't just to raise awareness among consumers. Business are also key players in data privacy, and while big names like Google and Twitter have large legal and security teams, smaller companies that also have access to personal data might not.

"We want them to be aware of their responsibility to be stewards of the data people entrust to them," said Kaiser.

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