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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Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, wants to know why China has 60 cultural centers in the United States while the United States has none in China. Lugar questioned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the disparity a couple months ago, as reported by the Washington Times:

“The Chinese, according to our records, have now established 60 Confucius centers here in the United States, but they are permitting only four of our centers to be built in China,” Mr. Lugar told Mrs. Clinton. “So I call this to your attention for some potential negotiations with [our] Chinese friends, as we try to extend this idea of diplomacy centers, which I think is important.”
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China’s so-called Great Firewall is well known for filtering out controversial content relating to democracy, Tiananmen Square and criticism of Beijing. But as this New York Times article shows, a large part of the censorship effort includes positive spin to proactively promote the government’s view:

Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens. And increasingly, it is backing state-friendly clones of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all Western sites that have been blocked here for roughly a year.

The government’s strategy, according to Mr. Bandurski and others, is not just to block unflattering messages, but to overwhelm them with its own positive spin and rebuttals.

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The New York Times has an interesting article on how technology is enabling protestors in Thailand. Well, actually the main point of the article is that Thais are losing some civility — “Thais Shed Culture of Restraint” — but an underlying theme is that technology has played a key role in making protests possible:

The role of technology in bringing together the protesters has been crucial. The leaders of the protest movement have used community radio stations, mobile-phone messaging and the Internet to forge an identity for lower-income Thais and connect a vast constellation of people in villages and towns.
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Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry has denied charges by Google that Vietnamese-speaking users of Google were being targeted by hackers according to this New York Times article:

The country’s Foreign Ministry published a statement on Saturday after fielding a question from the press about Google’s blog post, which was published on its online security blog on March 30.
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