A tweet just cost one CNN correspondent her post covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After observing a group of Israelis cheer as missiles rained over Gaza, on Thursday, Diana Magnay took to Twitter to call them “scum.” Magnay has been re-assigned to Moscow, a CNN spokewoman tells HuffingtonPost. 

Twitter wants Wall Street to stop focusing on its monthly active user numbers, which have been driving the company’s stock down, and, according to the social network, don’t reflect its true reach. At the end of the month, therefore, Twitter will reportedly debut several new metrics along with its second-quarter earnings. “The new metrics will measure the breadth of the audience that is exposed to Twitter's content but not logged in,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “The aim: to show Twitter isn't just a diminutive Facebook.” 

Still a mystery to many publishers, Buzzfeed has cracked the Pinterest code. That’s according to Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici, who marvels: “Just two years after it started explicitly producing content intended for sharing on Pinterest, the … network is already Buzzfeed’s second-biggest source of referrals, beating out runner-up Twitter.” Dao Nguyen, Buzzfeed’s VP of growth and data, says publishers are missing a massive opportunity by ignoring Pinterest. 

Twitter is facing a fresh lawsuit claiming that company fired a 57-year-old employee because of illegal age and medical bias. In the suit, the defendant’s “lawyers claims he was an exemplary employee, saying he ‘saved [Twitter] over 10 million dollars in the expansions of [its] data centers,’” ValleyWag reports. Part of a bigger problem, according to Gawker’s tech blog: “Silicon Valley fetishizes youth -- the 20-something, white, overworked male who will write code until his wrists tingle.” 

Web-born "fandoms" (devoted fan groups) have never had more opportunities to bond in the real world. Yet, as this weekend’s DashCon 2014 illustrates, large gatherings come with significant risk for organizers and supporters. “DashCon was originally known as Tumbl-Con USA, a convention aimed specifically at Tumblr culture enthusiasts,” The Daily Dot reports. This weekend, however, “it only took a few hours for DashCon 2014 to degenerate into the most catastrophic fan convention in recent memory.” 

Taking a deep dive into Instagram, Fortune considers what has made the photo-sharing network so popular, and what parent company Facebook has planned for the service. “Just as Kodak’s invention of a roll of film made it easy for almost anyone to take photographs … Instagram’s invention … makes everyone capable of creating and sharing nuanced, edited pictures today,” it writes. Yet, as Mark Zuckerberg recently said of Instagram: “Monetization isn’t our near-term priority.” 

Digg (yes, it’s still around) just launched a new feature that shows users what links their friends are sharing on social networks in real-time. “You can get this list in three different places: on the Digg homepage, as real-time email alerts and as mobile notifications from its iOS app (no news on the Android app),” The Next Web reports. The social news pioneer, which was acquired by Betaworks last year for a half million dollars, more recently relaunched as a very Google Reader-like service. 

Like a number of ad agencies, Google set up a “newsroom” to monitor buzz around the World Cup, and turn trending topics and stories into viral content. Invited to sit in on the action, NPR’s Aarti Shahani was struck by the newsroom’s tendency to consciously ignore negative themes. “In old-school newsrooms, the saying goes: if it bleeds, it leads,” Shahani notes. Yet, “because this new newsroom is focused on getting content onto everyone's smartphone, [mobile marketing expert Rakesh Agrawal] says, editors may have another bias: to comb through the big data in search of happy thoughts.” 

Business Insider considers the curious case of CYNK, which, at least on paper, appears to be the hottest social media company on the market. Having seen its stock jump from $0.10 to $14.71 in less than a month, the company currently boasts a market cap of about $4.29 billion. The only problem is that CYNK doesn’t have a dime of revenue, while its management and business model are total mysteries. “This premise … is basically a Facebook-like social network where you would pay … to connect you with someone else … maybe someone cool or famous,” BI notes. 

Facebook is the only social network to be used as a petri dish for secret social experiments. “The activities of users of Twitter and other social media services were recorded and analysed [sic] as part of a major project funded by the US military,” The Guardian reports. “Research funded directly or indirectly by the US Department of Defense’s military research department, known as Darpa, has involved users of some of the internet’s largest destinations, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Kickstarter, for studies of social connections and how messages spread.”