Celebrities Read Mean Tweets About Themselves for Jimmy Kimmel: VIDEO

Twitter is an unforgiving place. Anderson Cooper, Selena Gomez, Larry King, David Arquette and Jack Black know what I'm talking about.

But Jessica Biel just won the day.

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...

The Pope's First Tweets

The Pope started tweeting a couple hours ago. At this rate, how long before he tweets that gay marriage threatens humanity? Any bets?

If we're lucky, he'll send out a few Twitpics of these guys.

 

Pope Benedict XVI Joins Twitter as @Pontifex

The Pope has joined Twitter officially, though he has yet to send out a Tweet. He is receiving tweets, however, including this one, asking, "@Pontifex why do you defend child rapists?"

No doubt folks will have  quite a few similar questions.

Mashable writes: "The move was announced in November, when a Vatican official said the Pope (or, more precisely, whoever handles his Twitter account) would be tweeting fairly infrequently, with his tweets 'not veering far from his texts.' The Pope’s account currently doesn’t have any tweets. It follows 7 other accounts, which are all versions of the same account in different languages: German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, French and Arabic."

Obama 'Four More Years' Tweet is the Most Popular of All Time

Racking up more than 660,00 retweets so far, a tweet from Barack Obama reading "Four more years" sent last night at 8:16 pm quickly became the most popular tweet of all time, surpassing tweets from Justin Bieber, TJ Lang, Floyd Mayweather, and Kim Kardashian.

Ann Coulter Announces 'Disown Your Son' (for Being Gay) Day

Coulter tweets: "Last Thursday was national 'coming out' day. This Monday is national 'disown your son' day."

GLAAD reacts:

I recognize that this is a joke, and that she is not really taken seriously in any context anyway, but with this coming right after National Coming Out Day, at the start of Ally Week and just days before Spirit Day, I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about this idea of hers. There was a time in our culture's history when, if thousands of LGBT kids were to come out on the same day, the next week genuinely would be exactly what Ann describes, all across the country. Fathers disowning their sons and kicking them out onto the street. Mothers locking up their daughters or sending them to charm school. Children forced to undergo electro-shock or even worse forms of "therapy" to rid themselves of their orientation. To learn how to not be true to themselves.

And although we've come a long way from those ideas as a cultural collective, I have no doubt that last week, more than a few American households experienced the tragedy that Ann joked about. Approximately 50% of LGBT youth experience some degree of family rejection. There are as many as 100 thousand homeless LGBT youth on our nation's streets, and it's estimated that LGBT youth make up as much as 40% of our nation's homeless youth population. LGBT youth who are completely rejected by their parents are more than 8 times as likely to have attempted suicide. Pretty funny, right?

(h/t truth wins out)

Twitter Launches 'Political Index' on 2012 Election, Measuring User Sentiment Toward Obama and Romney

Twitter has launched a "political index" which measures sentiment toward Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and reports it on a daily basis.

Buzzfeed has the details:

Twitter is launching a tool today that it says will fill that gap, and sort through the 400 million tweets a day from 140 million active users. Twitter and real-time search engine Topsy are launching the "Twitter Political Index," a daily assessment of how Twitter feels about Obama and Romney, in an election cycle that's being played out moment-to-moment on the social service.

The index, which Twitter has retained Democratic and Republican polling firms (the Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research) to help perfect, appears to be the most serious and large-scale effort yet at a metric that has so far produced a lot of flops.

The rough version of how it works: Topsy pores through every single tweet in real time, determines which ones are about Obama or Romney, and then assigns a sentiment score to each tweet based on its content. That is, whether it's positive or negative toward Obama or Romney, and just how positive or negative it is. Add all the data up together and you have something like a real-time approval score for Obama and Romney, determined by what tens of millions of people are saying, which Twitter is going to release daily at election.twitter.com.