One year after the popular Egyptian uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, Twitter has announced that it will permit country-specific censorship of content that violates regional laws. Censored tweets would be greyed out and replaced with the words ‘This tweet from @username has been withheld in: Country’. As protests spread from Egypt in 2011, Twitter’s micro-blogging service became an important platform for protesters to air views, coordinate action plans and celebrate victory in a quick and globally accessible way. So powerful was the impact that when the London riots began, many cited Twitter for fuelling the fire, and called for the network to shut. Twitter was not just an agent of these uprisings. In its famous blog post a year ago, ‘The Tweets Must Flow’, Twitter officials appeared convinced that their service served an important global function: Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of ...

It seems, then, that the BNP’s appearance on Question Time (22 October) failed to incite the nationalistic fervour which had some critics biting their nails. The closest we seemed to get to some decent violence came, ironically enough, from the anti-fascist demonstrators outside the BBC London studio. The whole furore has been, quite frankly, a huge anticlimax. What was all the fuss about? It’s not like this was Nick (or ‘Dick’, as one audience wit dubbed him) Griffin’s debut on television. He has already appeared on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning show and Radio Four, after all. Nor would his appearance on Dave Dimbleby’s panel signify his importance as a political heavyweight, as Eddie Izzard, another former guest, would testify.Naturally, there was always a chance that Nick Griffin would come across as sensible, suave, and quite a decent chap. The same has happened to Le Pen in a similar television programme aired in France, in the 1980s. As a result of the broadcast, L ...

It could have been worse. He could have been naked, or covered in glitter. But for the Shoreditch lad caught vomiting outside a bar by Google Street View in March, such thoughts were probably of little consolation. His face was, after all, caught on camera for every Internet user’s viewing pleasure. As was his friend, with the reindeer antlers. The pertinent question which Google Street view has raised is: can we justify this amount of surveillance? And how much is too much? The Google Street View application covers 22,360 miles of road in 25 cities in the UK. Thousands of people have been caught on camera; hundreds have since requested their images be removed. The same cannot be said for the millions of CCTV cameras in the country, which log our everyday moves. We cannot ask to have ourselves taken out of every film recorded; and besides, the sheer number of cameras - about one for every fourteen people in Britain – would make the job impossible. You may find the idea of the drun ...