Twitter and Facebook Live became prominent tools of political communication on Wednesday for congressional Democrats protesting gun violence on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The planned sit-in was left without a TV audience after C-SPAN’s cameras stopped rolling due to the Republican leadership sending the House into recess.
C-SPAN elaborated that it had no control over the matter, seeing as its feed is operated by the House recording studio. With the cameras off, representatives took to their smartphones to live-stream their protest on Periscope and Facebook Live instead.
When C-SPAN caught wind of the broadcasts, it began airing the streams in an effort to chronicle the rare sit-in. C-SPAN’s footage shifted between the Periscope and Facebook Live clips as it continued to broadcast from the House floor without the aid of its own cameras.
C-SPAN has no control over the U.S. House TV cameras. Now showing a @facebook live from @repbetoorourke. pic.twitter.com/37syjiFNdf
— CSPAN (@cspan) June 22, 2016
Both Facebook and Periscope jumped on the opportunity to promote their respective live-streams. The latter created a dedicated feed for its users to tune into the broadcasts. In a first for Facebook, the social network highlighted the #NoBillNoBreak sit-in on its trending topics sidebar, with a “Live” icon accompanying the link.
Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour also took the opportunity to take a swipe at his company’s rival, by sharing a tweet that implied that Twitter’s app was favored by the sit-in’s participants. He was probably unaware that Facebook Live was also being utilized by the social-media savvy Democrats.
We may not have Chewbaca, but we have democracy https://t.co/dKDPTIa7Oa
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) June 22, 2016
“Today is an example of what drives us. Twitter and Periscope take you where other cameras don’t — letting you experience breaking news through the eyes of those living it,” Beykpour said in a statement.
The protesters decision to use live-streams was in violation of a rule against taking photos and videos in the House. Among the Democrats noted to be live-streaming from the House floor were Rep. Scott Peters of California and Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas.
“This is a milestone moment,” C-SPAN spokesman Howard Mortman told Politico. “We’ve got a commitment to C-SPAN as a public service, a privately funded public service to connect Americans to Congress to show what’s happening in Congress … this certainly rises to the event of something happening in Congress.”
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?