Black Twitter’s power has risen in public awareness with the proliferation of the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, following the killing of unarmed teen Mike Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. But while people are talking about it a lot now, #BlackTwitter has been around for a while.

A Southwest airlines (SWA) gate agent took exception to being called “the rudest gate agent”, and so flexed her tiny muscles by having a passenger and his children thrown off the flight for tweeting his displeasure, even after he had deleted the tweet, as gate agent Kimberly S. had demanded.

The FBI glossary of Internet slang acronyms reads like a leet speak (l337 5p3@k) primer, albeit a massively over-inclusive one. Indeed, in the time it would take an FBI agent to skim through the Internet slang glossary looking for a particular term, one would hope they could have just inferred it from context. Put together by the FBI Intelligence Research Support Unit (IRSU) and starting with ADN (Any Day Now) and ending with ZOMG (“emphasized OMG”) and ZUP (“what’s up?”), and everything in between, the FBI primer on ‘net slang is a whopping 83 pages containing nearly 3000 terms, many of them, if not most of them, not even really a thing. Although we are fond of BOGSAT (bunch of guys sitting around talking) and are now using it every chance we get.

The social media campaign to help find the nearly 300 kidnapped Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, hashtag BringBackOurGirls ( #BringBackOurGirls ) is now under a cloud because the pictures that the campaign is using are not only not of the kidnapped girls, but they aren’t even of Nigerian girls.

So what constitutes a lousy honeymoon? For some people it is a rainy week at a resort. For others it means that everyone on their cruise ship got sick or food poisoning. And for one unlucky fellow recently, it meant getting shoved off a cliff by his bride. Well, Twitter’s stock value honeymoon ranks somewhere in that range between food poisoning and murder. (Although we’d still place it far above than Facebook’s botched IPO.)

Saying that perhaps she should have shown “better judgement”, Russian Olympian and official Irina Rodnina (@IRodnina) downplayed the response to her racist Obama tweet – a picture of the Obamas, with someone offering President Obama a banana in the foreground.

With the holidays, you may not have heard about Justine Sacco, and her boneheaded Twitter tweet heard around the world. “Going to Africa,” she wrote, “hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” she tweeted. Yes, really.

The Vatican has announced that Catholics can receive indulgences in exchange for following Pope Francis on Twitter.

Twitter is trending with the promoted hashtag #AmexSync. Do you get annoyed with the “deals” that your Facebook friends “like” showing up in your newsfeed? Well prepare for it to get even worse on Twitter, as American Express and Twitter introduce Amex Sync, the service that connects your American Express credit card directly to your Twitter account. And rest assured, as Twitter has proven time and time again, your private information is secure behind their hack-proof system. (Not!)

As many as 250,000 Twitter accounts have been hacked and compromised, according to Twitter. According to Twitter, the attack “was not the work of amateurs,” in fact, says Twitter, “the attackers were extremely sophisticated.” Twitter users whose accounts were compromised in the attack have been sent the following email, advising them to change their password.

If you’re tired of the privacy concerns of Facebook, the anonymous social network called Social Number may be right up your alley. Giving the question, “what’s your number” a whole new meaning, Social Number lets users pick a user number, which is their only identifier on the social network. That means users will not have user names or identifying photos, just assigned numbers.

Twitter released their new video sharing service, Twitter Vine, Thursday, which allows Twitter users to film and share small, six-second-long looping video clips. Twitter says that these small little snippets are in line with its model of Tweets being limited to 140-character-or-less model for Tweets. Michael Sippey, Twitter’s vice president for product, wrote about Twitter Vine on Twitter’s blog on Thursday, “Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.”

The French-language version of Twitter has been an ugly and contentious place lately, and the French government is taking action. With recent hashtags of #SiMonFilsEstGay (if my son is gay), #UnBonJuif (a good Jew), and #SiMaFilleRamèneUnNoir (if my daughter brings home a black guy), the Grand Instance Court in Paris has ordered Twitter to create a way to alert French authorities of illegal content when an offending tweet is sent out.

If you cannot access Twitter, you are not alone, Twitter is down. In a short status update, Twitter announced, “Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”

The social media world is buzzing with opinions about the new Myspace now that they have released the new version. Ever since it was announced that Justin Timberlake was one of the new partners involved in reviving the dead social media site, the Internet has been flooded with speculations as to how the newly revamped site will compare with Facebook, Pinterest, Pandora, Songza and, of course, how it compares with the old Myspace.