Social media

Those Christmas pics are hard to resist posting… especially bearing in mind that everybody seems to be doing this. There are reasons however as to why you should not be advertising your Christmas moments on Facebook and other social media.

1. Leaving home for Christmas

Planking and the Ice Bucket Challenge are so 2014… to ‘get with it’ try face dancing, a new and exciting opportunity to enjoy 15 minutes of fame on social media. All you need to do is paint your face with figures and then scrunch forward with face gesturs to make the figure move.

'Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action' by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale, & Taha Yasseri (Princeton University Press, $30, 304 pages)

Social media make people do some very weird stuff to get likes and retweets. But the latest trend on Twitter is possibly the most bizarre we’ve ever seen.

It all started by Japanese comedian Masahiro Ehara, who somehow discovered that if he squishes his baby’s face, it will look like rice balls, and started a hash tag that translates to “#RiceBallBabies.”

Turkey's communications technologies authority, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), has fined micro blogging site Twitter 150,000 lira ($51,000.) for not removing content it says is "terrorist propaganda", a BTK official told Reuters on Dec. 11.

Justin Bieber spotted a mystery girl on Instagram on Monday and wanted eagerly to find out her identity.

The famous singer uploaded an image of the unknown beauty asking his fans to help him identify her.

He captioned the image: ‘OMG who is this!’. Immediately he received many messages from female fans claiming to be the young lady, as Daily Mail reports.

Are you one of those people who feels that they can post racist tweets in the comfort of their own home? Activists in Brazil are finding people who send abusive posts and are posting these messages on giant billboards near their home. The campaign is led by the civil rights group, Criola.

An unusual Twitter exchange took place between Greek PM Alexis Tsipras and Turkish PM Ahmet Davutoglu following the European Council of EU28 leaders. The Greek PM posted four tweets addressing his Turkish counterpart that goaded him about Turkey’s downing of the Russian Su024 jet.

ISIS and terrorism has gripped the world. A top story on the media, it isn’t unusual that teachers are making lessons more real for the children by including focuses of terrorism when teaching art, math and other subjects of the curriculum.

In art and history

#BrusselsLockdown has inspired a social media storm as people started sharing pictures of cats after police requested citizens not to tweet about the lockdown