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Donald Trump with Michael Flynn during a discussion on national security in his offices in Trump Tower in New York on August 17.AP Photo/Gerald Herbert In a series of tweets Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump blasted reporting on his campaign's ties with Russian intelligence officials as "conspiracy theories and blind hatred." "The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!"  Trump tweeted . Both MSNBC and CNN led Wednesday morning shows with a  New York Times report published Tuesday night that said members of Trump's campaign  had multiple communications with senior Russian intelligence officials before the US election,  as CNN White House video producer Elizabeth Landers  observed. Landers also said Fox News had not reported on the Times article Wednesday morning. In a follow-up tweet, Trump dismissed the "Russian connection non-sense" as...

While President Trump has helped make Twitter a regular part of the national conversation, the business behind the microblogging service is not looking up. That feeling was only reinforced by the meager revenues the  company reported  on Thursday. Things look especially slow when you compare the platform to rival social media apps. As this chart from  Statista shows, after gaining hundreds of millions of users in its first few years, Twitter has only added 31 million monthly active users over the past two years. Facebook's suite of behemoths have easily surpassed that over the same time frame, while Snapchat has outpaced it as well (though it has  slowed recently , too). Now, Twitter serves a much narrower niche than Facebook, so the fact that it can't keep up makes sense. But even with that in mind, the company appears to be in a prolonged rut.

Instagram has become more prevalent on the web than Twitter, according to an analysis by website tool provider  SimilarTech  of the top 1 million sites based on their global traffic, including publishers, brands and e-commerce sites. At the start of 2016, Instagram trailed Twitter in the number of sites that embedded its users’ posts or featured its social widgets, like follow buttons. But from January through December, Instagram’s footprint expanded by 308 percent to overtake Twitter, whose footprint expanded by 36 percent over the same period. It’s unclear what pushed so many sites to begin embedding Instagram posts and widgets on their pages in 2016. Instagram introduced the ability to  embed people’s posts on sites back in July 2013  and rolled out  follow buttons, or “badges,” in November 2012 . Instagram’s monthly user base growing from  400 million people in September 2015  to  600 million people in December 2016  li...

Tamar Weinberg tanuha2001  /  Shutterstock.com With Twitter’s  rampant  abuse problem, the company has been aggressively trying to find the right way to handle its crippling problem. An announcement  today  addresses Twitter’s overall improvements toward a safer, more pleasant tweeting experience, with the addition of three primary changes: abusive account creation prevention, safer search results and collapsing low-quality (or abusive) tweets. New Accounts Twitter says it’s being proactive about identifying users whose accounts have been suspended, primarily as a result of abuse and harassment, to ensure that they will not recreate new accounts. Safer Search A “safe search” will be implemented to remove tweets that contain sensitive content or tweets that have been made by blocked/muted accounts. The objective is for search to be less cluttered with more relevant (and possibly more interesting) results. Collapsing low quality tweets While Twitter ...