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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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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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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The New York Times has good article about some of the Chinese companies that are likely to benefit in the short term — but perhaps be less competitive outside of the country — due to Google’s departure. Google was never a great fit in China, with Baidu taking the lion’s share of the search market, and other American companies like Yahoo and Twitter faced obstacles as well:

Google and other major American Internet companies like Yahoo and eBay failed to gain significant traction in the Chinese market. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.

Instead, the hottest companies in the world’s biggest Internet market have names like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local firms that are making huge profits. Post-Google, China’s Internet market could increasingly resemble a lucrative, walled-off bazaar, experts say. Those homegrown successes, however, could have trouble becoming global brands.
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Hugo Chavez is ripe for caricature in the U.S. and he just got the snarky Gawker treatment for his latest announcement that he’s going to start blogging:

The prickly President of Venezuela has just about had it with the backstabby world of online political dissidence, and has vowed to fight back with a blog of his own. Generation Overshare, please welcome your soon-to-be newest comrade.
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Hat tip to MediaPost, which has noted that the Saudi Arabian Embassy to the United States is now tweeting as @SaudiEmbassyUSA:

Yowza! Okay, it’s not quite Ashton or MTV, but that’s kind of the point: if risk-averse diplomats (whose whole job is basically message and brand control) see value in Twitter, it would seem to suggest even the most conservative, publicity-shy brands can find a home on the burgeoning social communication site.
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The Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance has a report indicating a 20 percent increase in hate-affiliated content, according to CNN:

The report, Digital Terrorism and Hate 2010, notes that there are about 11,500 hate-affiliated Web pages, a 20 percent jump from last year’s study.

According to the Wiesenthal Center, personal blogs as well as mainstream social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter are easily flooded with racist and terrorist-related content.
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According to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the company famous for forcing 140 character brevity  is working on a way to let Chinese users sign up in their own language.  He made his comments at a discussion on digital media Monday. According to the Associated Press:

Twitter is working on a way to allow Chinese users to sign up to the social networking site in their own language, a co-founder of the site said Monday night, but access to the popular site remains blocked in the country. . . .

Dorsey said he has no idea how Twitter would get around the firewall. He admitted he didn’t know the site was blocked in the country until three weeks ago when he was prepping for the event.
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The Pentagon’s selective ban on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites is being lifted for its non-classified network, according to a Reuters article in the Washington Post:

[I]t could mean big changes for large portions of the armed forces, including the Marines, which had selectively banned social media on work computers.

The Department of Defense also had bans in place since 2007 on accessing certain bandwidth-gobbling Web sites like YouTube on its network. . . .
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The New York Times has a story on the State Department’s trip to Moscow, with various social media honchos in tow, along with Twitter King Ashton Kutcher. They’re calling it “geek diplomacy”:

This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.
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