For anyone who missed it, the brouhaha began this morning when sports site Deadspin reported that Twitter had cut off Guy Adams, an LA-based reporter for The Independent. Adams has been a standard bearer for the new #nbcfail hashtag and used his account to rattle off a series of British-inflected tirades about NBC’s time delay: “‘Sneak peak’ my arse”; ”tosspot”; “Matt Lauer would do well to shut up, wouldn’t he?” and so on.

Adams apparently crossed a line when he published the email address of NBC executive Gary Zenkel and told followers to “Tell him what u think.” NBC complained to Twitter and shortly after the micro-blog site suspended Adams’ account.

Critics have since called attention to the fact that Twitter has partnered with NBC’s parent company to promote the games, and suggested that the companies decided to shut down Adams’ account as an act of reprisal.

In an email message to Adams, Twitter explained the account had been suspended because he had violated terms of service that forbid disclosing private information like a person’s telephone number or private email address. Deadspin and others have noted that gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com is a corporate address.

So who is right? Did Adams overstep a boundary or are Twitter and NBC wrongfully censoring a journalist? Well, from a legal point of view, Twitter is in the clear. The company’s terms of service make it plain that it can boot users off the site anytime and for any reason.

Twitter’s moral position is a lot more shaky. Its reason for tossing Adams is flimsy (the email he printed was not private) and, worse, they simply caused him to disappear altogether. If you search @guyadams on Twitter, the company will suggest users with similar handles but the original Guy Adams has simply vanished in the same way that disgraced communists would vanish from Kremlin photographs.

This policy of “disappearing” people without a trace is unhealthy and something Twitter should reconsider. The site has bravely opposed police gag orders and published a groundbreaking transparency report to highlight government censorship.

In the future, Twitter should show who it is barring from the site and explain why. In the meantime, it should give Guy Adams his account back.

Update: The Telegraph reported Tuesday that NBC claims that it was Twitter who informed their social media department about Adams’ tweets and informed them how to file a complaint. Meanwhile, respected social media journalist Danny Sullivan has pointed out that Gary Zenkel’s email address was not widely available. Other are questioning the appropriateness of using Twitter to initiate ‘email bombing.’ As of Tuesday morning, Twitter has remained silent in the face of what appears to be its biggest PR crisis to date.

(Image by Rui Vale de Sousa via Shutterstock)

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Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. cited a “widely-believed” but “mistaken” notion about online privacy rights and said that search and seizure protections don’t apply because we “do not have a ‘physical’ home on the Internet.”

The ruling, which grows out of the Occupy Wall Street protests, reinforces a troubling legal trend that declares people have no privacy right in their online communications — even though they spend more and more of their time on services like Twitter and Facebook. Ironically, the judge acknowledged as much:

The reality of today’s world is that social media, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ or any other site, is the way people communicate..

The communications in this case were the tweets of Malcolm Harris, who was charged with disorderly conduct after marching on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Tweets, by their nature, are public communications, but a search of his Twitter account would also reveal more private information. As the court explained, “Twitter collects many types of  user information, including IP address, physical location, browser type, mobile carrier among other types.”

In his ruling, Judge Sciarrino Jr. compared Twitter and email accounts to bank records. He cited a 1976 case in which a divided Supreme Court said a defendant had no right to stop searches of his bank statements because the records were the property of the bank.

In blunt language, the judge explained:

Here, the defendant has no proprietary interests in the @destructuremal account’s user information and Tweets … Twitter’s license to use the defendant’s Tweets means that the Tweets the defendant posted were not his. 

Twitter itself has a history of aggressively standing up for the rights of its users by notifying them when law enforcement wants to search their accounts (other sites like Facebook routinely pass on user profiles without notifying them).

The notification process allows users an opportunity to challenge the searches in court and ensure they are not overly broad. Rulings like that of Judge Sciarrino Jr., however, undermine that ability by saying that users don’t have a right to get involved in the first place — even though it is their data at stake:

The widely believed (though mistaken) notion that   any   disclosure   of   a   user’s   information   would   first   be   requested   from   the   user   and   require   approval   by   the   user   is   understandable, but wrong. While the Fourth Amendment provides protection for our physical homes, we do not have a physical  “home”  on  the  Internet.     [..]    As  a  user,  we  may  think  that  storage  space  to  be  like  a  “virtual  home,”   and  with  that  strong  privacy  protection  similar  to  our  physical  homes.     However,  that  “home”  is  a  block  of  ones  and  zeroes   stored  somewhere  on  someone’s  computer.   As a consequence, some of our most private information is sent to third parties and  held  far  away  on  remote  network  servers.

The judge also used the ruling to show off his fluency with Twitter itself. Referring to the microblog’s convention of using hashtags as keywords, he noted that Harris’s motion to “#quash” the subpoena was “#denied.”

The judge’s social media prowess was also on display in 2009 when he was disciplined for friending lawyers on Facebook.

Here is the ruling itself:

OWS Twitter Copy

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In 2011, Twitter’s advertising revenues grew 233 percent, and LinkedIn’s sales were up 95 percent, and both are set to see more growth in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, just days before an expected IPO, Facebook has solidified its lead in online display advertising not just in social networking, but over all online properties.

According to figures out from eMarketer today, Twitter’s revenue from advertising was a mere $139.5 million in 2011, but that was actually up by 233 percent over 2010. The analysts believe that international growth will further push that number up to $259.9 million this year, a rise of 83 percent.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) actually rounded off 2011 with more ad revenues than Twitter, with $154.6 million in sales. But it will see much more modest growth in the years ahead, with that figure only going up by 46 percent in 2012 to $226 million. At the moment, LinkedIn is proving to have the bigger international profile when it comes to advertising, with some 32 percent of its ad revenues expected to come from outside the U.S. in 2012, versus only 10 percent for Twitter. (Full tables with forecasts at the bottom of this post.)

Today, Twitter has some 300 million users compared to 135 million for LinkedIn, and so some of Twitter’s gain on LinkedIn in ad revenues could be down to that simple fact. User numbers may, too, be the reason why Twitter will widen its lead in ad sales even further in the years ahead. By 2014, eMarketer predicts that Twitter will have annual ad revenues of $540 million compared to $405.6 million for LinkedIn.

But even those 2014 figures are still less than 15 percent of what Facebook makes in advertising at the moment, mostly in the form of display ads.

With revenues of $4.27 billion in 2011, $3.8 billion of that from advertising (eMarketer via WSJ) Facebook is the social network to beat. That’s true today but also in the future, as it only continues to enhance the services it offers to engage users and keep them on the site for longer.

According to figures provided by comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), in the U.S. Facebook has widened its lead in the display-advertising market in 2011. It now has 27.9 percent of that market, compared to 21 percent the year before. That puts Facebook significantly ahead of the next-closest competitor in display, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), which is at 11 percent. The full figures for 2011 and how they compare to 2010:

In UK figures provided also by comScore, the leadership of Facebook is even stronger, with over 30 percent of the market for 2011 in terms of revenues.

With Twitter and LinkedIn, it is too early to tell which social network’s ad formats prove to be the more engaging, and more attractive to media buyers.

For now, it looks like LinkedIn is winning at least in the variety stakes, with ads to match particular user profiles and professions, as well as different areas for placement (Profile Page, Home Page, Inbox, Search Results Page and Groups) and formats. Twitter has, so far, concentrated on promoted tweets as the basis of their advertising. LinkedIn offers advertisers a self-serve platform for its services. Twitter launched its ad platform only in November 2011, and as eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Wiliamson puts it, the “verdict is still out” on whether it will gain traction.

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Twitter bought up Summify, a news summary service, and Facebook introduced some 60 new apps to its network. And Facebook could soon be extending time spent on the site even more: a report out today says that Facebook is in talks to replace YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) as the host for premium music video service Vevo.

The report, from CNET, says that Facebook has held talks with Vevo to move its video service over to Facebook when its contract with Google’s YouTube expires in a year. The report cites sources close to the matter, but has not confirmation from any of the named parties.

The arrangement, CNET writes, would be similar to what Vevo already does with Google on YouTube: Facebook would host and stream the videos, and Vevo and Facebook would both sell and share revenues for ads that run alongside those videos.

Vevo could be a lucrative partner for Facebook in its bid to grow advertising on the site. According to November 2011 figures from Nielsen, Vevo is second to YouTube in terms of unique users (43 million versus 130 million). Facebook itself has made a lot of moves to add video partners to its service too, and it comes in fourth at 30 million. When it comes to the total number of streams, however, Vevo pales to YouTube (535,000 vs 13.4 million), and Facebook does not rank at all. Ditto on time spent per user, where neither Vevo nor Facebook make the top ten, and YouTube is in fourth place (Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) is the king of time spent per user, by the way).

A deal with Vevo would also follow a pattern of moves that Facebook is making to increase user engagement.

The company this week also introduced a lineup of new apps — some 60 of them — specifically designed for users to add into their Timeline, the new graphical homepage view that Facebook has introduced.

These apps will add more functionality — and hence, the hope is, engagement — in its new Timeline feature. They cover all manner of special interests, from food (a Foodspotting app) to crafts (a Pinterest app) and travel (TripAdvisor) and of course those social games that are a cornerstone of Facebook’s regular apps catalog. Facebook says that the list will grow over time.

Timeline has seen some controversy — some complain they don’t like the look of it; others question how Facebook will use the new layout and information manipulation for commercial gain. In that sense, the apps will either win skeptics over with their usefulness, or make them even more suspicious of how Facebook is encouraging information sharing, even when it does provide some options for limiting that.

When you think about it, it’s not too surprising to see Facebook adding more usefulness and stickiness to its site, as it seeks to grow its primary form of making money: advertising. Eyeballs are the currency of online advertising and so social networks have to figure out not just how to grow their user bases, but how to keep them interested once they are there. That’s an area where Twitter is also focusing:

Yesterday, it was announced that it would be acquiring Summify, a Vancouver-based startup that developed a way to read users’ feeds from Twitter, Google Reader and Facebook and pull out relevant news into a summarized list. The selections, which can be viewed via an app or the web, are made based on your own browsing history, as well as the popularity of particular stories (eg, those that have been retweeted a lot).

Twitter has not revealed much about the deal: no details of the price, or how, exactly, Summify will work as part of Twitter. From a blog post at Summify, we do know that the company has stopped taking new users and will evenutually shut down the standalone service. Also, its employees are packing their bags and moving to Twitter’s HQ in San Francisco.

But given that Twitter, too, is looking to grow engagement on its site — a recent hire in the UK from BBC’s Sports division also demonstrated that — you can see where a service like Summify could potentially fit in: a secondary view of your followers, perhaps, maybe integrated to have a better experience around a user’s lists and favorited tweets. The added information a curated list of news would provide on content consumption could also come in handy for figuring out what ads to point a users’ way, too.

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According to figures from ZenithOptimedia, global advertising revenues will reach $486 billion in 2012, a rise of 4.7 percent compared to 2011. With wider economic pressures bearing down on the overall ad market, digital ad spend is still seeing healthy growth: it will account for slightly more than one-fifth of all ad spend, but more than half of all growth, as advertisers become more confident in digital media metrics, and the ad industry gets more sophisticated in what it offers to brands and publishers in the name of digital advertising — which will remain a key way of funding digital content, as media companies continue to tinker with other charging models. Here are some specific areas to watch in this space:

Social media and advertising. Social networks already make money from marketing and advertising services — according to an estimate from eMarketer in September, Facebook apparently will have made some $3.8 billion in advertising revenue in 2011 — so 2012 will be the year that we see more social networks, not just Facebook, look at leveraging their audiences to grow this even more.

These advertising services will be a crucial piece to put into place for Facebook in particular as it gears up for a widely-expected IPO. Keeping in mind recent IPOs for Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) and Zynga, in which people questioned the longer-term business models for these social media properties, Facebook will be looking for big and consistent sources of revenue to demonstrate to the investor community that it has a solid foundation for the long haul.

As my colleague Jeff pointed out, they may also be the source of more debates about online privacy. Facebook has already started laying the groundwork for how it might draw on the content and nature of a users’ activity on the site as a route to promoting products and services to others within users’ timelines. Similarly, Twitter is moving to new ways to advertise brands to users, for example, with promoted tweets populating people’s timelines. There are very likely more innovations along these lines in the pipeline.

New ad formats on social networking sites may, to some, feel like a violation of an individual’s space, and we may see more challenges and questions coming from regulators and users as a result. On the other hand, some argue that if these services free to use, this is the price to pay. What might equally be interesting is to see whether ad-driven sites like these at any point consider paid, ad-free versions of their services.

Ads get a bit more personal. I don’t think that it will be only social networking sites that make use of our personal information in new ways in advertising. Companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) are also looking at ways of leveraging its databases to make its advertising units more valuable. One example is a new search ad format that automatically inserts your gmail address to sign you up for marketing lists if you click on a link in the ad. The other area that is worth watching here is mobile advertising, where an advertiser uses potentially a combination of an opted-in user’s location, browsing activity and purchasing habits to deliver relevant ads and offers to consumers.

Consolidation: small, medium and large? Last year saw some significant acquisitions that pointed to ongoing consolidation as digital advertising continues to mature: Google’s $400-million AdMeld purchase (which officially closed earlier this month); ValueClick’s $75-million acquisition of mobile ad firm Greystripe; and Adobe’s purchase of Efficient Frontier, all of which further pad out the bigger companies’ ad services business.

There will very likely be at least a few more deals like these, but the question is whether consolidation could also extend to bigger players like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and AOL (NYSE: AOL). They are still some of the strongest companies in online advertising (with 13.1 percent and 4.2 percent of the overall display market, according to eMarketer) but they are being hit hard by companies like Google and Facebook, once known respectively for search and social ads but already now bigger than AOL and Yahoo in display revenues.

If you believe the reports, Yahoo is already in play: Alibaba, the China-based internet giant that is a parter of Yahoo’s in that country, currently wants to buy Yahoo out of China, but Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, apparently also has an option to buy Yahoo outright, too. He has already enlisted the help of lobbyists in Washington, which could prove useful if Ma decides to bite.

As for AOL, it recently had to weather an embarrassing leaked letter from one of its biggest investors, Starboard Value, ripping apart the company’s business strategy and accusing it of focussing too much on “money-losing” areas like its content business. AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong’s response has been: be patient. But if things don’t start looking brighter for AOL in 2012, investors like Starboard could take things up another notch and call for something a little stronger.

Read the rest of the posts in our Coming in 2012 archives.

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Simplified

The new app has a less complicated interface than the old one, in terms of having fewer buttons across the bottom bar, and fewer interactivity options for your main stream of tweets. It makes the experience and layout cleaner, but it also irks in some regards, especially for someone like me who manages multiple Twitter accounts. That’s because the ability to switch accounts is now located unintutively behind the “Me” tab, and takes two steps to get to from the home stream instead of just one, like the old “Accounts” button did. You can switch accounts by swiping left on the Me button, too, but it seems a little hit-or-miss.

The DM button is gone from the bottom bar, having been moved to the “Me” section, but once again, it introduces more steps, not less to get there. You can swipe up on the Me button to access your DMs from any screen, however. In the case of both changes, I can only assume Twitter found the average user wasn’t using either feature very often, and so they were better off out of the way.

The change to the tweets that appear in your home screen seem unnecessary even from that perspective, however. You can no longer access a quick menu of functions for each tweet on the home screen like you could before. Now you have to tap through to the post itself to reply, retweet or favorite the tweet.

Interactions

The new Connect tab features not only @mentions, but also a new “Interactions” section that details both your conversations and tells you about new followers, much like Google+ notifications inform you of new connections, in groups divided by days. It’s a small, but welcome, addition and should mean more users can turn off email notifications of new follows and still keep on that info.

Discover

One definitely positive change is the “Discover” section. It includes the ability to search Twitter, but also introduces more information and context for #hashtags and trending stories. You can see information about each popular “Story” listed, and then tap through for tweets that mention the subject, armed beforehand with some useful information about what the story actually means. It’s a big improvement for Twitter’s trending topics, and one that should serve the service’s efforts to appeal to marketers, and average users, well.

Better overall? Depends.

Overall, I’m seeing a lot of positive reaction to the aesthetic changes made to the iOS Twitter app on Twitter, and it definitely feels truer to Twitter’s brand than the previous, mostly generic incarnation. I’ll miss the in-stream ability to interact with content, however, which for me emphasized Twitter’s prioritization of communication above all else. Plus, it still doesn’t address the issue of the notification badge count remaining at one, and there’s still not a way to mark all your DMs as read at once. Despite its failings, I’m betting for the majority of casual users, with the addition of Interactions and Discover, this will probably be considered an improvement.

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In a post on Twitter’s official blog, the company details new relationship with Mass Relevance, which singles out the most relevant tweets for its brand clients, and buzz measurement provider Crimson Hexagon.

Both Mass Relevance and Crimson Hexagon can bring existing partnerships with media companies to the table. Mass Relevance, for example, recently agreed to power the Twitter integration in NBC’s The Voice, while Crimson Hexagon provided “Twitter analysis” in CNN’s 2010 election coverage and Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address.

Earlier today, it was announced that Shazam for TV will be featured during the second season of the USA Network’s spy drama series Covert Affairs. By “Shazaming” at any point during the show, USA fans will unlock video and photos from Globe Tracker, a multi-media gallery of on-location content shot by the show’s main actor, Christopher Gorham.

With the launch of the new series, Shazam is also introducing a new feature in its app, which allows fans to buy merchandise from a show. As part of a new partnership with Delivery Agent, which manages e-commerce functions for NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) programming and 40 other entertainment companies, Shazam can provide viewers with a single-button purchase experience to buy fashion brands seen in the show or fan gear from the show.

In the meantime, GetGlue, one of the earliest services to bring the Foursquare-like experience of checking into a shop or restaurant to TV, has been aggressively courting marketers and networks with the beta launch of GetGlue Business, a self-serve marketing dashboard that allows TV, movie and music companies to create more enticements for consumers-such as deals on merchandise. (GetGlue is more than just TV, as it also provides check-ins for movies, music listening and events.)

In addition, Yahoo’s IntoNow has been also striking deals with shows like Project Runway for its check-in service.

The latest entrant into the social TV space is an iPad app, available starting today in the iTunes Store, called Umami, which uses audio fingerprinting technology to automatically and continuously sync to live and time-shifted programming from 40 major broadcast and cable networks. But instead of just checking in, the app offers an array of info related to the show being viewed, including bios, photos, news and conversation.

There is a tremendous amount of research available now about the amount of “multitasking” going on by TV watchers, especially younger ones. But how engaged are they? And do viewers who are hooked on a particular show want to pay more attention to their iPad or their smartphone instead of the actual program?

“Except for diehard enthusiasts of specific shows, most consumers aren’t going to download an app for each of their dozen favorite programs; like their remote or their electronic program guide, they’re going to want a place where they can get interactive experiences. This creates the opportunity for independents like us,” says Scott Rosenberg, Umami’s CEO.

As Umami was getting started, Rosenberg surveyed the social TV space and identified three categories:

1) Network-initiated: apps built by the TV networks themselves, generally for a single show, since most viewers tend to be fans of programs, not content companies. The HBO Go and Bravo Now apps are obvious exceptions.

2) Check-in plays: low on content, generally focused on conversation and game mechanics

3) Guidance plays: focused on recommending programming to consumers across multiple platforms, based on algorithms and social cues

All of these areas have definite promise. The long-term challenge is to resist the temptation to be the “one and only app users will ever need.” The short-term challenge is to prove to advertisers and networks that social TV can deliver on creating a substantive connection between audiences and networks and advertisers.

“Despite all the hoopla around the second screen and social TV, this is not a land grab — consumers’ multi-screen behavior is still rapidly evolving, and it’ll take years, along with a lot of technology and handholding, for networks to start truly taking advantage of that behavior,” Rosenberg said. “The prize will go to the player/players who can supply the right enabling technology, are very service-oriented toward the nets, and have a platform and economic model that makes it easy for networks and advertisers to activate two-screen experiences.”

Whether that player is Umami, GetGlue, IntoNow — or Twitter and Facebook on their own — is the question that will be answered over the next year.

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And to cap off the celebration, it looks like the company has also closed a huge funding round of $800 million, with $400 million from DST closed last month and the remaining $400 million closing today. Investors are understood to include Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, according to Fortune.

Some of the other numbers that came out in today’s presentation in San Francisco led by Dick Costolo, a mix of meaningful data and some random trivia:

– 230 million tweets a day on average, a rise of 110 percent since January 2011. Five billion tweets/month.

– The 100 million active monthly users, which are based on people sending a Tweet in the last month, is an increase of 82 percent since January 2011. Comparing those percentages, that means people on average are tweeting more. The number is also growing faster than it was in 2010. Half of that 100 million figure are logging in daily.

– The U.S. is growing as fast as the rest of the world.

– Twitter thinks it will add 26 million active users in the next four months, as many as it did between 2006 and 2009.

– More than 55 percent of active users are accessing via mobile devices — underscoring how important that channel is for the company. The aim is to be on 2 billion devices — no target date set for that but that will involve more than just handsets and computers, most likely.

– There are more than 400 million monthly active unique visitors to Twitter.com, a growth of 70 percent from the beginning of the year. But there is also a sizeable number of passive users on the network (a possible segment that Twitter might market to in more specific ways in future?): more than 40 percent of active users have not tweeted in the last month (so they’re just logging on).

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The news, aptly enough, was announced via a tweet from Alexander Macgillivray, the company’s global counsel: “Very happy to welcome longtime user advocate @colin_crowell as @Twitter’s Head of Global Public Policy.”

Later, Crowell himself later noted that he would be starting in mid-September.

Crowell is a long-time DC player in telecoms and technology regulation. Crowell served as a senior aide to Congressman Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, where he worked for more than 20 years on telecom and technology issues. That covered the time when Markey was chairman of the House Telecommunications Subcommitte and was ushering through such big pieces of legislation as the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

In 2009, he became an adviser to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski focusing on broadband policy. More recently he has been running his own consultancy, Crowell Strategies, working with clients like Sprint (NYSE: S) and Google.

With his remit covering global public policy, it will be interesting to see how and if Crowell also gets involved in some of the recent issues that have been hitting Twiter outside of the U.S., too.

Those have touched on some of the issues that affect Twitter in the U.S. — such as privacy and cybersecurity.

In the last month, officials have been meeting with executives from Facebook, Twitter and RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger group to discuss the social networks’ role in the riots earlier this month across England: critics said that they were used to help organize attacks. One big point of debate has been around whether the police has a right to shut down these kinds of social networks in times of crisis to better control situations.

Twitter was also in the legal spotlight in the UK earlier this year around the topic of superinjunctions, and whether those who post tweets that are in violation of them can get prosecuted, and identified if they are posting under names that cannot be easily tracked.

This is the second major hire Twitter has made in DC in the last 12 months. Last November it hired Adam Sharp to serve as a government liaison.

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It seems totalitarian states like Egypt and Libya aren’t the only ones struggling with the impact of social media and the desire to muzzle services like Twitter and Facebook. In the wake of the riots in London, the British government says it’s considering shutting down access to social networks — as well as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry messenger service — and is asking the companies involved to help. Prime Minister David Cameron said not only is his government considering banning individuals from social media if they are suspected of causing disorder, but it has asked Twitter and other providers to take down posts that are contributing to “unrest.”

The British PM also said he has asked the police whether they need any new powers to stop the violence, including the ability to shut down social networks or communications services if they believe these tools are being used to incite unrest. Police in Britain have reportedly already begun arresting people based on their use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, charging them with suspicion of inciting violence and/or disorder for posting tweets, and photos. In his statement, Cameron said:

[W]e are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

It’s not clear how the British government plans to identify who is “plotting” to commit violence or criminal acts using social media, however. Would posting a photo of a burning car be enough? Would retweeting someone who admitted to causing violence get a user’s account shut down, or result in questioning by the authorities? The prime minister didn’t say. Meanwhile, British Home Secretary Theresa May is reportedly meeting with Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry to discuss their “responsibilities” during such events.

Twitter says it won’t remove posts or users

For its part, Twitter has said it has no intention of blocking any users’ accounts or removing their posts. A spokesman> who talked to The Telegraph about the issue referred to a Twitter blog post from earlier this year entitled “The Tweets Must Flow,” in which co-founder Biz Stone and Twitter’s general counsel Alex Macgillivray said: “We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.”

Those comments were made during the popular uprisings in Tahrir Square in Egypt, when the Egyptian government shut down access not just to social networks and mobile communications networks, but eventually to the entire Internet: an attempt to smother dissent that ultimately failed, and may have actually accelerated the revolution in that country. Britain’s prime minister and his government would no doubt argue that there is a world of difference between what they are doing and what Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak did, but free-speech advocates aren’t likely to agree.

As we’ve pointed out before, the role that Twitter and other social tools have played in the London riots is identical to the role they played in the uprisings and demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries. In other words, they have allowed people to connect with each other and distribute information quickly and easily to tens of thousands of users of these services. That’s the power of real-time networks. Obviously, that has allowed some to spread misinformation and plan acts of violence — but it has also allowed others to correct that information, and to coordinate positive moves as well, such as planning a cleanup detail in the wake of the London riots.

As author and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has noted in his response to the British prime minister’s comments, democratic governments have to be very careful in making moves that curtail free speech, even if they think their motivation is justified. And as others have pointed out, Britain is already on what many believe is the wrong side of the freedom of speech issue in other ways — including its support for so-called “super-injunctions” that restrict the publication of certain information about court cases in that country, and in some cases have resulted in bans on using social media.

Why not crack down on telephones too?

If social-media tools such as Twitter and Facebook hadn’t been invented yet, would Britain’s prime minister be considering a crackdown on telephone use (as author Douglas Adams once mentioned), or the publication of images on blogs or websites? Would the British police be questioning or arresting people for discussing the unrest and violence in bars or the public square? That seems unlikely (although not impossible). But the British government’s apparent willingness to consider shutting down or blocking access to Twitter and BlackBerry’s BBM falls into the same category.

Fundamentally, these tools are used for what amounts to public speech. That speech can be about violence and where a mob should go next to burn something, or it can be about how to overthrow a dictator. It can be about images of disorder and calls for looting, or it can be about how to organize a cleanup crew. It may be tempting to smother that kind of speech when a government feels it is under siege, as Britain seems to feel that it is. But doing this represents nothing less than an attack on the entire concept of freedom of speech, and that has some frightening consequences for any democracy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jennifer Moo and Petteri Sulonen

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