Twitter

The "mute" button, which enables users to not see tweets from individual accounts, is being extended to prevent tweets containing chosen key words or phrases appearing in the notifications bar.

It will also enable users to opt out of seeing conversations they are added to.

There will be more categories for reporting offensive material as well.

Twitter admitted the steps would not remove abusive conduct from the platform altogether.

In the three months to September, revenues rose 8% to $616m. That was better than forecast, but lower than the 20% rise in the previous quarter.

The number of average monthly active users rose 3% to 317 million.

Last month, Twitter hired bankers ahead of a possible sale, but bids from potential suitors such as Google and Salesforce failed to materialise.

Vine let people share six-second-long video clips that played on a loop.

Twitter did not give a reason for the closure, but earlier on Thursday it announced it was cutting 9% of its workforce following slow growth of the social network.

"In the coming months we'll be discontinuing the [Vine] mobile app," the company said in a blog.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said Chicago-based Geofeedia had allowed police to "sneak in through a side door" to monitor protests.

Geofeedia said it was committed to the principles of personal privacy.

It comes amid growing concern about government access to social media.

Technology website Recode reported that Google, Apple and Walt Disney were unlikely to bid for the company.

Cloud software company Salesforce.com is now thought to be the most likely buyer of the business.

Twitter shares rose 5.74% on Wednesday on reports that it was expected to receive takeover bids this week.

Takeover talk

Issues began just before 3 pm ET and lasted about three hours. And during the outage, users took to Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) to air their complaints. Downdetector -- which monitors outage complaints online -- reported more than 13,000 posts from users all over the world Saturday afternoon.

In a stream of tweets, the Republican presidential nominee urged Americans to examine Alicia Machado's personal history and her "sex tape".

He implied his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton had secured US citizenship for Venezuelan-born Ms Machado.

In response, Mrs Clinton tweeted: "This is unhinged, even for Trump."

In its place, is a message saying it has been removed following a "report from the copyright holder".

The image included a photo of the multicoloured sweets taken by a UK-based man, who is himself a refugee.

Donald Trump Jr's post caused a furore when it was published last week, and was Twitter's highest trending item.

Conservative Heather Wheeler shared a graphic with a medals table split between "Rest of World", "British Empire" and "EU post-Brexit".

After congratulating Team GB, she then wrote: "Now for the Trade Agreements."

The South Derbyshire MP said the tweet was a joke in response to another total which put the EU medals together.

But the post - entitled "Empire Goes For Gold" - has been labelled "deeply offensive to so many people and their ancestors" by Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy, while others have called it "insensitive and ignorant".

According to Twitter, it's not as straight forward as you might think.

You can get in trouble for posting anything which is a breach of copyright

This includes videos, photos, logos and phrases which any company, in this case the International Olympics Committee's (IOC), has registered.

The rules around the Olympics are more strict for companies as they arerestricted from even using the hashtag #Rio2016 to affiliate themselves with the games.