Thanks for reading. We’ll be on hiatus for the time being but you can stay updated on the latest social media-diplomacy developments via our Twitter account, @idiplomacy.

Demi Moore visited Capitol Hill this week to talk about the problem of sex trafficking. Moore and her husband Ashton Kutcher have long used their celebrity soapbox to draw attention to various causes, with Kutcher (@AplusK) having the distinction of the most followers on Twitter (4.8 million). (Moore — @MrsKutcher isn’t too shabby with over 2.6 million followers.)

Moore said she would like to see laws increase the penalties for sex traffickers and also secure greater funding to help rehabilitate victims. She has been working with the Department of Homeland Security on the issue and that she and Kutcher are currently working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking too, according to this Politico story.
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If you’re in Paris through May 16 you can see a unique art exhibit composed of thousands of cell phone videos shot last year by anti-government protesters in Iran. The AFP has more:

The organisers of the Paris exhibition — titled “Action 1″ — viewed thousands of internet videos from Iran before making a selection to present at a gallery on one of Paris’s busiest shopping streets, the rue de Rivoli.

Banks of television sets there show dramatic video of young people throwing stones at security forces, riot police carrying out savage beatings and scenes of blazing tyres and cars.

One bank made up of nine screens shows the same troubled street scene shot from various angles — street level, rooftops, apartment windows. Often the voice of the person filming can be heard.
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Twitter may be U.S.-based company, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may, to put it mildly, dislike the United States, but that doesn’t mean he  is shunning social media. We mentioned in an earlier post that Chavez was going to join the social media world, and he has proven a prolific tweeter since joining the microblogging service last month.

According to the BBC, his first tweet translated to: “Hey how’s it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I’m off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!”
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Google’s treatment of privacy has raised concerns abroad, with 10  countries, mostly European, writing a letter to Google.

The letter was sent last month by privacy and data protection officials from  Germany, Canada, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In addition to concerns about Google Buzz, the company’s latest foray into social networking, the officials also criticize Google Street View, which features pictures taken by cameras mounted on cars.
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The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world in terms of shelf space, with over 30 million books. But it’s about to expand it’s holdings quite significantly — by 10 billion tweets and counting.

The New York Times has more on Twitter’s donation of its archives to the United States’ oldest federal cultural institution:

TWITTER users now broadcast about 55 million Tweets a day. In just four years, about 10 billion of these brief messages have accumulated.

Not a few are pure drivel. But, taken together, they are likely to be of considerable value to future historians. They contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before.
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As expected, Google’s late March exit from China is benefiting Baidu, China’s number one search engine.

This Reuters story has some stats the Chinese company’s rapid growth:

Baidu posted first-quarter net profit of 481 million renminbi, or $70.4 million, up from 181 million renminbi a year ago. Analysts expected profit of 366 million renminbi, according to Thomson Reuters data.
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iDiplomacy will go on spring break for a few weeks but we’ll be back in May.

Patrick Brethour of The Globe and Mail interviewed Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell about social media and why he is notably absent from social media, with only biannual blogposts, a placeholder for a Facebook page an no presence on Twitter.

A couple relevant excerpts:

For a lot of people in the media, tweeting is almost obligatory. Why not for you?

There’s only so much you can do in a day. And I don’t feel I lack for platforms for expressing myself. I have books, I write for the New Yorker. If I gave people any more, they’d get sick of me. . . .
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WikiLeaks is in the news again for its release of a video showing a 2007 military attack in Iraq that killed two employees of Reuters. The classified video had been seen by Reuters editors in an off the record viewing after they filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but they had been unable to get a copy. It  currently has over four million YouTube views.

The Pentagon, not surprisingly, is not happy about the release of the video. Critics of WikiLeaks say that the more widely viewed 17 minute edited video is misleading in that it does not “make clear that the attacks took place amid clashes in the neighborhood and that one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade,” according to this New York Times article.
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