Twitter is credited with helping to cause the Arab Spring revolution. Photo: Jonathan Rashad | Flickr.

That’s what Twitter’s head of global public policy, Colin Crowell told Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions that the new policy by the social media company to allow censoring

Quoted in the Telegraph, he said it “wasn’t with any particular issue or particular country in mind”.

The way it would work in the UK would be to restrict access to unlawful tweets, such as those discussing gagging orders. Earlier this year, many such gagging orders were truthfully and falsely discussed openly on websites including Twitter. One such person revealed to have ordered an injunction by Twitter, and subsequently named in the House of Commons, included Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer.

Mr Crowell is also quoted in the Telegraph article as saying:

“I don’t pretend to know exactly how an injunction process would work,” … “we would need to receive some notice presumably”.

“But the policy as we announced was when we received a request [for censorship] from an authorised entity we will deal with those.”

Mr Crowell also said Twitter has never received a super-injunction from a British court.

On the Twitter blog post, the company said they would be working closer with Chilling Effects, “which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.”

The new policy caused outrage over the weekend, resulting in many users boycotting the site to take part in #twitterblackout. Twitter, amongst other social media networks, was credited with helping to cause the Arab Spring and facilitate an uprising against world leaders.

Twitter said in a post on its blog

As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.

After the calls at the weekend for the policy to be changed, and the boycott, Twitter updated the post and stated:

Q: Do you filter out certain Tweets before they appear on Twitter?
A: No. Our users now send a billion Tweets every four days—filtering is neither desirable nor realistic. With this new feature, we are going to be reactive only: that is, we will withhold specific content only when required to do so in response to what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request.

As we do today, we will evaluate each request before taking any action. Any content we do withhold in response to such a request is clearly identified to users in that country as being withheld. And we are now able to make that content available to users in the rest of the world.

It should also be pointed out that on the same post Twitter says “The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact … almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.”

What do you think? Should Twitter censor tweets if they breach injunctions? Should it happen at all? Or is this a step in the right direction?

Let us know…

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This was written by Andrew Stuart. He is @andrewstuart on Twitter, and runs his own website www.andrewwgstuart.com

Is a journalist saying ‘I don’t need to do Twitter’ the same as a reporter saying ‘The telephone? No, I’ll stick with the telegram, thanks?’

— davidhiggerson (@davidhiggerson) January 22, 2012

I made the short response on Twitter. The long response is here:

Let’s not think of Twitter as one magnificent fix-all tool. We’ve never, ever, had that. A mechanic has never got a wrench and said “this is the best wrench in the world. It’s the latest and fits all things. It’ll solve all problems.” It just doesn’t happen.

Similarly, an airline pilot has never thought that flying a Boeing 747-400, fully laden, from Newcastle to London would work – It wouldn’t. The plane is too heavy, it costs too much in fuel. You would be better off with a small jet, like a Fokker or a BAE 146.

Why? Because different tools are good for different jobs.

Twitter is good, nay fantastic, at crowd sourcing opinion. That is essentially a buzzword, but it basically, it means Twitter is good at finding opinion. Have you ever sat and watched a TV show in the new form of two screen viewing – that is Twitter open on a smartphone or laptop, and the TV on the programme. Many, many people offer their opinions on the programme, to a ready and waiting audience, using hashtags. Other people respond, or just take it in. It’s not the best way in the world if you want to enjoy a good drama, but this piece by Lucy Mangen in the Guardian says it has saved event TV. She says:

“Watercooler moments”, whereby people gathered the next day at work to talk about a particular attention-snagging programme or plot twist, were deemed to have vanished. Now they are back. The only difference is you don’t have to wait until the next day to share your amazement, vent your spleen or bemoan the death/betrayal/surprisingly good profiteroles of your favourite character, singer or #gbbo contestant.

So, if you are a local journalist, working on a newspaper that may well be short of staff, or you may be required to file a zillion stories as well having 6 meetings before lunch, Twitter is going to be your way in. That’s the key. Way in. You can search for what’s happening, and see who’s affected by an issue. Then you can get a phone number or arrange to meet, and get an interview.

The other way of doing it on a local level is for major traffic problems, or snow, or something that affects many people over a large area. You can use Twitter then to publish opinions, written in the heat of the moment, to get a persons instant reaction, rather than considered opinion.*

You will be able to get pictures and opinions instantly, which you can use (with proper credit and permission)

The next benefit is a heads up on a story. Obviously, in an emergency situation like a fire, you call 999 first. When the fire brigade arrives though, someones is likely to tweet “Oh, there’s been a fire in such and such a road.” They may tweet a picture. That’s where your photographers and reporters swing into action. The best local news photographers have a knack of being able to be at places very quickly, as well as reporters. So, the reporter can speak to people at the scene, using good old shorthand or a voice recorder. The photographer gets the pictures that make the next days splash. The fire service give their account, and you get a more human story than regurgitating a press release or voicebank message later.

I am in no way saying that before the advent of Twitter we were better off. I am saying that, beforehand, there was a good source of the community who would ring a newspaper desk or reporter direct and say “fire at such a road” or “police are smashing a door in” and the reporter would be there quickly. That still happens, but now we have a greater source of stories from people who offer it up without asking.

Local news can also benefit from asking people. Twitter is great for that. Twitter helps get comments on stories when they’re published, but also comments on developing or skeletons of stories. A tweet may just direct you to a council meeting or a comment that you may have missed. A tweet may say “yes this proposal is great, but the traffic on my road is already bad” and that means you have a different angle on a story.

One of the more popular hashtags around news is late in the evening, and done by BBC man Nick Sutton. #tomorrowspaperstoday is when he tweets first editions of tomorrows front and back pages, minutes after being signed off and sent to print. It’s that sense of being first which I think people love about it.

As an end point – because so much has been written and I can’t add anything substantive at the moment to it – the other thing social media, rather than Twitter alone, was responsible for was the Arab Spring and uprisings. It helped, and worked alongside traditional methods of communication. It doesn’t mean to say it’s the sole way of doing the business, and the best. It’s not. It works in some situations (as detailed above), but not others.

I’m not going to go in too much detail, but would an investigative reporter tweet his or her daily life and what they’re doing? Not necessarily. It’s counter productive for obvious reasons.

It does mean you have to follow and know who’s who on Twitter in the area. Some great resources for using it are found on David Higgersons blog with his social media advent calendar, and Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog, with his many post on the subject of Twitter.

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- This post was written by Andrew Stuart. It was originally published at www.andrewwgstuart.com He is @andrewstuart on Twitter if you wish to tell him why you agree or disagree.

*(I should point out that it’s illegal to use a handheld mobile phone whilst in control of a car, so always tell a passenger to do it for you when tweeting or taking pictures. Never do it until the car has come to a full and safe stop.)

On Friday 6 January, I was sat at my computer, as I often am, when a tweet popped up from my community website about a burglary in the area;

I clicked back to the site to read more – a neighbour had seen Molly the pug being carried away by two men and reported it to the police;

I then went back to Twitter to RT the owner’s appeal;

Over the weekend, hundreds of people, including celebs like Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton, did exactly the same thing;

A Facebook page was launched. Media outlets picked up on the story, locally and nationally;

It seems all this combined exposure, pressured Molly’s nappers into releasing her and enabled her to be identified by a conscientious member of the public, who found her wandering a couple of miles away in Enfield;

We are constantly hearing about the death of community spirit. And how online networking has destroyed real-life communication. But this pearl of an incident encapsulates why these beliefs are patently untrue. Okay, the modern concept of togetherness might not be the leaning-over-the-garden-fence type of old but what we have today with social media can be just as, if not more, powerful.

Close friend Kerry Finch told the Croydon Advertiser that Emma West had been reported to the British Transport Police at the time by a fellow passenger and removed from the tram by officers, who decided not to press charges.

This was a prosecution that only came about after the video ‘My Tram Experience’ went viral. The shaky footage, taken on a mobile camera phone, was uploaded to YouTube and has since been watched by more than 11 million people around the world.

A video still from the YouTube video which has been viewed over 11 million times worldwide

The video was shared on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and formed the subject of countless blog posts. It was responded to and even remixed online. Other similar videos started to emerge; ‘My Tram Experience Part Two’ and ‘My Bus Experience’ also drew huge audiences. The hashtag #mytramexperience trended as people used it to add their voices to the debate.

The sentiments expressed in reaction to the video were sometimes just as virulent as the opinions shrieked in the original. Piers Morgan used his Twitter account to call for her deportation and following the release of her address online, she received threats that prompted the police to imprison her over Christmas for her own safety.

Chief magistrate Gerald Ellis was forced to deny her bail application, saying “there are grounds for believing Miss West is not safe. We hear a number of death threats have been made”.

On November 28 the BTP announced via Twitter that they had arrested Emma West, a 34-year-old New Addington woman as a result of #mytramexperience being brought to their attention, and that she was due to appear in court later the next day.

Conservative MP for Croydon Central Gavin Barwell told MPs in the House of Commons that the language used in the rant was “foul”, but added “on a positive note, does this not show the power of social media both in allowing a suspect to be caught and in showing the vast majority of Croydon residents do not share the same views?”

This was a story that would never have been a story without social media, just another sad example of intolerance witnessed by only a handful of people on a tram. The video was uploaded onto one social media site and shared via many more. The outrage generated online forced the issue onto the news agenda, a compelling example of how ‘it can all start on social media’.

For more on the online reaction to the story, see some of the collected tweets and video responses on Storify:

http://storify.com/globaltvnews/british-woman-charged-after-racist-youtube-tram-vi/preview

Follow @Lauren__York on Twitter

“I’d have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.”

See the video here: 

Ordinarily Clarkson’s comment would have been brushed under the carpet and disregarded, probably with an aside stating that Clarkson is just extremely skilled at disgruntling people. Indeed, JC has gained a reputation for making obtuse remarks. (Read about some of his best here.) Although I do not agree with his remark, surely Clarkson was just doing what he has always done? Made a “silly” comment, (David Cameron’s response), perhaps in an attempt to raise some eyebrows, but not meant in all seriousness.  Indeed, the BBC swiftly issued a response stating that Clarkson often overstepped the mark in his ‘quest for “comic” value’. However, rather than shrugging their shoulders as they may have done pre-social media, JC’s comments sparked mass hysteria amongst the British public on social media outlets.

By the following morning, the BBC had received 22,000 complaints, which finally totalled at 38,000. Many calling for Clarkson to be sacked for his outrageous comments, whilst broadcasting regulator Ofcom were pushed to investigate the comment made on the 7pm daily show.

Further than this, Dave Prentis, General Secretary of Unison union called the BBC requesting for Clarkson to be sacked, and contacted lawyers in the hope the Clarkson could be reported to the police for inciting violence.

Clarkson was forced to apologise for his comments, saying that he did not mean for them to be taken seriously, that his comments were taken out of context. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Clarkson said:

 “I was just making a joke about the BBC’s need to be impartial. If you listen to the whole interview, you’ll see there isn’t a case to answer.

“Most people who are complaining haven’t seen the full interview.”

Clarkson hit national news the following day as a result of the public’s outcry. However, was his sardonic comment really worth so much media attention, and would people really have complained before social media provided a platform for individuals to publish their knee-jerk reactions? Social media in November therefore provided the perfect medium for mass hysteria, as the British public overreacted, made incensed statements and ranted about Clarkson’s comments – in a style similar to something Jeremy himself would have been proud of had he not been the subject!

But what triggered this turnaround – and the collapse of his biggest rival, the independent candidate Seán Gallagher? A Gillian Duffy style-encounter? A misguided policy pledge?

No – 91 characters.

Gallagher, a star of Ireland’s version of Dragon’s Den was sailing to victory as the election campaign hurtled towards a conclusion. A poll in the Irish Times just four days before the ballot put his share at a comfortable 40 per cent, well ahead of Higgins at 25 per cent.

That was, until tweeter @McGuinness4Pres put a proverbial spanner in the works.

Imagine the scene. Here’s a picture to help you.

24 October. Three days before the election. A live debate – the last before the election – on the RTÉ show Frontline. All seven presidential candidates are present.

After some heated discussion about the integrity of Gallagher’s activities with the Fianna Fáil party, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness claims that he has spoken to a man who says he gave Gallagher a €5,000 cheque at a fundraiser in 2008. Cue some strenuous denial; “that is not correct,” Gallagher says.

Host Pat Kenny then reads out the following tweet, seemingly from Sinn Féin.

The tweet visibly rattles Gallagher. He falters as he responds and the audience jeers. Repeatedly. He then caves in and admits that he may have received “an envelope” for Fianna Fáil from someone he describes as a “convicted criminal and fuel smuggler.”

“If he gave me an envelope I . . . if he gave me the cheque it was made out to Fianna Fáil headquarters and it was delivered and that was that.”

And with that sheepish admission, and further accusations about an irregular company loan, came an almost instantaneous collapse in Gallagher’s support.

In the aftermath of the election, Gallagher’s press advisor Richard Moore said:

“Before 900,000 viewers on a live TV show that can be earth shattering. And it was earth shattering. There’s no doubt about it but that it was – not the only reason – but probably the principal reason as to why apparently so many people deserted his campaign in the last 48 hours.”

It later transpired, in an investigation by the Irish Mail on Sunday, that the tweet did not come from the official McGuinness campaign account nor Sinn Féin, but a social media manager from Dublin who denied any political allegiance and stated he was simply “tired of corruption in Ireland.”

Mr Gallagher’s team said they would lodge a formal complaint and blasted RTÉ for not checking the authenticity of the tweet.

But it was too late – Gallagher’s support plunged to 28.5 per cent come election day and Higgins romped home with a commanding 39.6 per cent share of the votes.

The lessons here? Apart from highlighting the importance of a) not accepting cheques you shouldn’t b) then denying it – and c) verifying Twitter sources, the incident attests to the power of social media to steer the political agenda.

Rumours were already swirling around Gallagher, so in the circumstances it was delivered – in the full glare of TV cameras and the nation, with no support team close at hand for the floundering candidate – this tweet, irrespective of it being a hoax, acted like a flame to a tinder-box.

Occupy Wall Street protestors on September 17. Photo: David Shankbone (Flickr, CC licensed)

From its very beginning on September 17, the Occupy Wall Street movement sought to make use of the lessons learned from the Arab Spring in order to both organize itself and make its voice heard. Originally organized by the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters but soon becoming an autonomous thing unto itself, Occupy Wall Street effectively evolved into a global phenomenon in the months prior, with nearly 1,500 groups listed worldwide at time of posting.

Occupy has made use of social media in many different ways. From the outset, Twitter has been both an important communication tool and way to create awareness of the movement. While one of the originating posters suggests #occupywallstreet as the official hashtag to communicate specifics, it was soon replaced by the much more concise #ows. Other communities soon joined, and hashtags such as #OccupyBoston, #OccupyDenver and, by mid-October, #OccupyLondon followed. Within weeks, #ows was one of the top hashtags online, with it being used in one out of every 500 tweets containing hashtags globally by October.

By early October, the longer #OccupyWallStreet hashtag was being dropped in favour of the much shorter #OWS. Click for interactive graphic.

While the decentralized nature of Twitter hashtags makes them a particularly poignant way for movement users to interact, other, more centralized, social media has been used effectively by Occupy to accomplish various ends. Local organizers have created individual pages for their city, with the official Occupy Wall St. Facebook page currently having over 360,000 Likes. While perhaps more top-down organizationally than a Twitter hashtag, Facebook pages allow communication of Occupy-created media to a larger audience, in essence creating a more lasting social media presence than the more-ephemeral Twitter posts. Similarly, YouTube Channels like OccupyTVNY allow OWS’ media team to post video clips shot at various events, while its LiveStream channel allows them to broadcast events live as they happen, in addition to creating a very active IRC-style chat space for those watching.

In the future, Occupy seems poised to move to its own social media platform. Mashable reports that an Occupy-only, Facebook-like platform is under construction, with the intent of connecting protesters while securing communication against authorities who may subpoena traditional social networking sites — such as happened in Massachusetts to Occupy Boston’s private Twitter messages. Much like how Google launches products under an invite-only model, new users will need an existing user to “sponsor” their registrations.

London: the epicentre of August's unrest - photo credit: George Rex (Flickr)

From August 6^th onwards one story dominated the British – and at time, global – media. Be it traditional sources; newspapers, television and radio, or modern media channels; Twitter, Facebook and blogs, it was impossible not to be excruciatingly aware of the summer’s English riots.

The riots were arguably 2011’s biggest news in Britain, and will leave a mark on areas of British society for decades, but from a social media perspective, they were – perhaps – just as ground breaking.

Social media’s involvement in the riots can be broadly broken down into four areas; dissemination of news, exaggeration of risk, establishing the post-riot clean-up operation and receiving blame from police and political figures.

The first tweets mentioning the disturbances began emerging at around 8:30pm on August 6^th, just as the first serious unrest got under way.

Mainstream news organisations already had reporters on the scene for the erstwhile peaceful demonstration, with the airwaves, TV screens and newspaper web pages soon abuzz with updates on goings-on, but Twitter was there first. One reason for this may be that news editors were understandably keen to verify any reports before throwing them out to the masses, but the instantaneous nature of Twitter certainly shone through regardless, with employees of top news organisations among those taking to the ‘Twittersphere’ with just as much alacrity as members of the general public.

Leading the way among the professionals harnessing Twitter was The Guardian’s Paul Lewis, who went on to accumulate an additional 35,000 followers over the course of the disturbances and their aftermath thanks to the unrivalled coverage he provided.

In the last couple of years Twitter has emerged as an excellent source of breaking news, and the August riots were arguably the best example of this to date. Twitter lists, hailed by many users as the social network’s most useful function, came to prominence no more so than when Sky News’ Neal Mann complied his Riots list, allowing other users to keep abreast of the latest developments as reported by the most reliable and reputable sources.

Another example of social media’s centrality to the August unrest concerns Youtube, where Malaysian student Ashraf Haziq was attacked and then mugged by a group of would-be Good Samaritans.

There were; however, drawbacks to Twitter’s sudden explosion during the riots. First, many less experienced – and perhaps more excitable – users began tweeting about breakouts of rioting where there were none. In one example, a report of looting at Angel’s N1 shopping centre was retweeted over 40 times, even though the source had emphasised that this was unconfirmed. There was no looting there. These were not malicious attempts to cause panic, but rather the result of people who, upon hearing or seeing signs of a police presence, believed that this meant there must be rioting taking place – “no police without riots”, to misquote a familiar idiom.

More extreme, but ultimately harmless, was the spread of outlandish riot rumours. In one example, an image of Cairo’s Tahrir Square full of protesters and military vehicles was tweeted, supposedly as evidence that the army had moved into the area surrounding the Bank of England. Again, users fell over themselves to retweet.

One wholly positive use of Twitter was in its creation and promotion of the @riotcleanup user account and hashtag. Within an hour of its creation, the hashtag was one of Twitter’s top trending topics, and clean-up ‘events’ were soon springing up all over London and other disturbance-hit parts of the country in a wonderful example of community cohesion and unprompted altruism organised through social media.

This blog series is dedicated to stories where social media played a central role in their breaking and continued coverage, but with the riots the level of involvement of social media went even deeper. Hundreds of column inches in national newspapers were actually devoted to accusations that social media was responsible for the triggering, spread and extent of the riots, and senior police officers and politicians alike made statement after statement about how the likes of Blackberry Messenger (BBM) were to blame for many of the wrongs of those few days of chaos.

While there was an element of truth to the BBM line, suggestions from the upper echelons of Scotland Yard that Twitter be shut down during the riots were shown to be wide of the mark, with riot-related Twitter traffic almost invariable spiking after disturbances, not triggering them, as some had suggested.

Even after the riots themselves had come to an end, social media stayed in the headlines, with several cases of youths receiving jail sentences for their use of Facebook in attempting to incite further disturbances.

When you consider the above it is undeniably clear that social media, and in particular Twitter, was not only a platform for discourse and dissemination during the riots, but was in fact a key part of the narrative. Without meaning to belittle what was a terrible few days for all those involved, one might easily look at the events of the Arab Spring and say that the August unrest was very much a 2011 tragedy.

“One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests.”

Five days later, on Friday 22 July 2011, Breivik posted a YouTube video, which Storyful contributor Gavin Sheridan describes as: “a mishmash of anti-Islamic propaganda and a digested version of Breivik’s manifesto”. The video has since been removed from YouTube but reposted on a TwitVid webpage.

Sheridan also links to the manifesto, “2083 A European Declaration of Independence”, in which Breivik casts himself as a Knight Templar. He later claimed to be part of an anti-Muslim network plotting a string of attacks across Europe, though investigators believe he acted alone in the events that followed.

Later that day Breivik detonated a bomb targeting government buildings in central Oslo and went on a shooting spree at a youth summer camp organized by Norway’s ruling Labour party on Utøya Island. He killed 77 people.

Among the first-hand accounts from Utøya, amid desperate tweets and Facebook messages, Adrian Pracon’s testimony to the BBC suggests the horror and confusion:

“I then heard gun shots and could see people running. As they were running, they were shot in the back. People were falling dead right in front of me. I ran through the campus to the tent area. I saw the gunman – two people started to talk to him and two seconds later they were both shot.”

Storify user Kathy E Gill records how a Facebook update summoned help from boats on the fjord, saving at least two lives, as desperate youths attempted a desperate swim from Utøya to the mainland.

Within hours of the shootings the inevitable fake Twitter account was set up in the name of “@AndersBBreivik Anders B. Breivik”, and a single Tweet posted:

“Please download the updated version of my Manifest: 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence : api.ge.tt/0/9E7jLS6/0/bl… #NORIA“

The download, a crude ‘screw you’ to morbid web surfers or perhaps just a bad joke, follows a mocked-up front page with a string of cat snaps. The account currently has 79 listings and 3,503 followers.

A mirror of Breivik’s actual Facebook Page has apparently been preserved, in all its banality, on the Public Intelligence blog.

But neither Breivik nor social media’s bottom crawlers should have the last word on this story.

Gill’s Storify pieces together tweets from one of Breivik‘s victims, Marte G. Ødegården, aka. @miniodegarden, who was shot in the back but survived. On Dec 30^th 2011, Ødegården tweeted (here translated, impeccably no doubt, by Google Translate):

“Thanking all the Twitter people for this year’s massive support and concern. Sets the incredible price on it. I hope everyone has a wonderful 2012.”

It may have started late in the previous month, but it can be argued that the downfall of Anthony Weiner really came about in June. It was in this month that more photos were published by biggovernment.com and transcripts of conversations published on other websites.

On June 6th, Anthony Weiner, then Member of the House of Representatives for New Yorks 9th district, made a statement where he admitted the picture that had been shown from May 28th was of him, and he sent it.

“I am so sorry to have disrupted her life in this way.” he said, apologised to the people involved, and said he had “done things I deeply regret.” He was preceded on the stage by biggovernment.com’s Andrew Breitbart who grabbed the empty microphone to explain his side of the story.

Anthony Weiner said he wouldn’t resign on June 6th, then did announce his resignation on June 16th, after further details about his online relationships surfaced. He formally left Congress on June 21.

It was one of the big stories that dominated news in America, and played a big part in the UK, but most of all was followed online, where it all started.

The other big thing of the month – Google+ arrived! The brand new social network from Google – on the back of failed attempts like Google Wave and Google Buzz – actually seems to be taking off. It launched on June 28, to a limited user base as Google took its time to get the new product right. It’s taking it’s time to get settled in and people to use, but with over 62 million users reported by late December, it seems to be getting there.

The final big thing of June – Internet music streaming service Pandora surprised investors by seeing a big take up in its IPO for the New York Stock Exchange. The service is free to users, and pays out millions to record labels each year to allow it to stream the tracks – but offered over 14.7 million shares at around $16 dollars a piece. It is currently trading at 10.01 dollars on NYSE close on December 30th.