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.

Moore and Kutcher are working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking and she wants to see increased penalties for offenders and more funding for victims. And, according to Politico, they’re enlisting social media to help the cause too:

The actress said she is also helping to put together a task force called the DNA (short for Demi and Ashton) Trafficking Tech Task Force which will include “some of the brightest minds of Silicon Valley” –from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Craigslist” — to help with the issue.

“Technology has enabled the problem, but technology can be used to solve the problem,” she said in the interview. “For those abusers and predators online, they better watch out. We’re looking to expose the anonymity by which they are taking comfort.”

The DNA Foundation (@DNAFoundation) launched Jan. 25.

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!!”

In addition:

A close aide, Public Works Minister Diosdado Cabello, announced . . .  that Chavez supporters planned to “storm” social networking sites.

“The opposition thinks it owns the social networking sites – they think Twitter and Facebook belong to them,” he said.

“We’re fighting and there are seven million of us who will have Twitter,” he declared, referring to the membership claimed by Mr Chavez’s United Socialist Party.

Chavez has close to 200,000 followers, and he has, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, invited Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Bolivian President Evo Morales to join as well:

“The potential this has … it’s not capitalist, it’s not socialist, it depends on how it is used,” he said after posting two messages on his page @chavezcadanga.

//

“I invite Evo and Fidel,” Chavez said. “Evo – are you on Twitter? Let’s invite Evo to Twitter,” Chavez said during a visit to a cattle ranch with Bolivia’s president.

Both Morales and Castro are close allies of Chavez and the three men are Latin America’s most vocal critics of what they call the U.S. empire. . . .

Many Venezuelans laughed when Chavez announced he would join Twitter, wondering how their famously verbose leader, who speaks almost daily for hours on end, will keep to the service’s 140-character limit.

Chavez’s page name includes “candanga,” which translates locally as a rebellious or strong-willed person.

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. . . .

A Facebook group with 200,000 followers – is that an illusion of mobilization?

It depends on what you’re trying to do. If I’m putting together a flash mob, that I want everyone to meet me in half an hour in Times Square, it’s really useful to have 100,000 followers on Twitter. If I want everyone to go to my website and buy my new book, it’s incredibly useful to have 100,000 followers on Facebook. If I want to start a political movement to overthrow a tyrannical regime, it may be less useful. If you follow me on Twitter, I do not own your heart. I may own your pocketbook momentarily. And I may own your attention for five seconds, but that’s it.

In The Tipping Point, you talk about ideas spreading just like epidemics. Do social media accelerate that spread?

Do ideas spread through social media? I don’t think they are vehicles. People aren’t spreading ideas on Twitter, they’re spreading observations, perhaps. The point of Tipping Point is that I was very interested in face-to-face interpersonal reactions. If social media or online communication is the means to the creation of a personal connection, it’s a fabulous thing. But if it’s an excuse to not make a connection, it’s ultimately a trivial thing.

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.

“If the Chinese government continues to favor domestic companies, those companies that reach critical mass could become phenomenally profitable,” said Gary Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures, an American venture capital firm with investments in China. “But it may be hard for those companies to become world class without outside competition.” . . .

The story behind the success of these companies is a simple one, some analysts say. The young people who dominate Web use in China are not just searching for information; they’re searching for a lifestyle. They are passionate about downloading music, playing online games and engaging in social networking.

“Sixty percent of the Internet users here are under the age of 30,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. “In the U.S., it’s the other way around. And in the U.S. it’s about information. But in China, the No. 1 priority is entertainment.” . . .
One question, though, is whether Google’s departure will prevent Chinese companies from developing alongside the world’s technology powerhouses.

“When the Chinese companies go outside of China, they will find that they fail to understand their competitors as well as they did when they were competing in China,” said Mr. Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures.

Of course, Chinese companies may just be happy staying home. With 400 million Internet users and growing, their own market is a substantial prize.

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.

Chávez, who last week called for censorship of the internet in Venezuela, is digging in against his online critics. Yesterday, on his weekly radio show, “Hello President!”, Chávez said:

“The Internet is a trench in the struggle, because there’s a conspiracy current building up. It’s as if they had a gun, a cannon. They use so many pages and blogs, and terms like Blackberry and Twitter, these conspiracy currents.”

Indeed, these “currents” can be scary, Mr. Chávez, but probably not as scary as you might think. Anyway, he says he is still “pro-Internet,” and he’ll be blogging from the presidential palace soon.

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.

The Saudi Embassy’s first tweet appeared on March 8; since then, the Twitter account has been used for news updates, with links to articles about a speech by King Abdullah on the kingdom’s future prospects, business analysts’ views of current economic conditions there, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visiting Riyadh, and so on. Currently the Saudi Twitter feed has a relatively modest following of 47.

They’ve now topped 72 followers and I suspect they’ll be in the triple digits before long. MediaPost also notes that they are on YouTube, with various speeches by the Saudi Kongand Foreign Minister.

Interestingly, the Saudi Embassy is now also on YouTube, with a number of videos posted, featuring speeches by King Abdullah and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. Although the embassy has disabled comments on its own videos, it is still exposed to negative PR from YouTube’s suggested “related videos” posted by other users, which cover many of the same events — press conferences, U.N. addresses, and so on. A quick look at these videos reveals that there are indeed some hostile comments, including Islamists criticizing the Saudi royal family, but also people expressing counter-views — in short, social media functioning like it’s supposed to.

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.

“The spike is not in traditional Web sites in the United States,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “It’s more global and almost all in the social-networking area.”

Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Wiesenthal Center and a co-author of the report, said home-grown terrorism suspects have an active online presence. He cited the case of a Pennsylvania woman who officials say called herself “Jihad Jane.”

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.

When asked whether he would give user information to the Chinese government, he said he hoped the company could work with the U.S. government to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“Step one is translation, getting the site accessible in a Chinese version,” said Dorsey. “That’s something the company is really pushing to do.”

But moving into the country is something “that’s very difficult to do,” he said.

What’s not clear is whether Chinese users would be allowed 140 Chinese (Han) characters. Since a Chinese character is equivalent to a syllable there are typically fewer Chinese characters per word than in English; 140 Chinese characters could allow for more writing than in English and other languages using the Roman alphabet.

[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. . . .

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, 66, has said that he wants to use social networking to help the Pentagon interact with U.S. military members, many of whom are in their early 20s.

But opponents have cited the risks of information leaks, of opening gateways to hackers, along with a potential overload of precious bandwidth on the Defense Department’s network.

The new policy says commanders will still need to defend against cyber-attacks and block access to online pornography, gambling and sites promoting “hate-crime related activities.”

It also allows commanders to temporarily limit Internet access if the bandwidth is overwhelmed, a key caveat for U.S. forces fighting the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or stationed in remote, rugged places around the globe.

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.

The approach is an unorthodox one, punctuated by such strange moments as Mr. Kutcher’s tweeted discovery of a Siberian man whose arm bore a large tattoo of his face. But it indicates how seriously Washington takes online networking as a social force.

Among the delegation’s goals was to persuade Russia’s thriving online social networks to take up social causes like fighting corruption or human trafficking, said Jared Cohen, who serves on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s policy planning staff.

But it also references an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal by Evgeny Morozov, who isn’t so sure that social media is going to succeed where more conventional means of diplomacy have not :

While sanctions and negotiations—the well-tested ways of wielding American power—do not get us very far with China and Iran, social media as a tool of foreign policy has the unique advantage of being untested. It never failed—so it must be working.

An attempt to log on to Facebook in Iran. The screen reads in part, ‘access to this site is not possible.’

It’s easy to see why a world in which young Iranians embrace the latest technology funded by venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, while American diplomats sit back, sip tea and shovel the winter snow on a break from work, sounds so appealing. But is such a world achievable? Will Twitter and Facebook come to the rescue and fill in the void left by more conventional tools of diplomacy? Will the oppressed masses in authoritarian states join the barricades once they get unfettered access to Wikipedia and Twitter?

This seems quite unlikely. In fact, our debate about the Internet’s role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why: Revolutionary change that can topple strong authoritarian regimes requires a high degree of centralization among their opponents. The Internet does not always help here. One can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. This is what may explain the impotence of recent protests in Iran: Thanks to the sociability and high degree of decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran’s Green Movement has been split into so many competing debate chambers—some of them composed primarily of net-savvy Iranians in the diaspora—that it couldn’t collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The Green Movement may have simply drowned in its own tweets.

Rita J. King, whose work studying how people learn about Islam in the virtual world of Second Life we have featured in a previous post, has a different take; she agrees with Morozov that “Twitter and Facebook can potentially present more harm than good when it comes to creating and executing a real revolution, but so could drawing your pistol slower back in the wild wild West.”

King adds:

While Morozov focuses on what he perceives to be an illusion of “techno-utopianism,” I would argue that the illusion runs even deeper, because even successful revolutions eventually morph into the hard reality of “now what?”

And “now what” will not be solved on Twitter or Facebook, but rather within complex platforms that foster design and simulation of better systems that benefit more human beings, which is what the #RusTechDel is attempting. The sum total of the Internet is not just social media, but also the facilitation of more thoughtful, sophisticated design of systems that will undermine human suffering and give us a greater understanding of the common bonds that make us human and ultimately give our lives meaning.

I absolutely support the ongoing development of meaningful social media and its ability to make us more complete, connected human beings. It is revolutionary in itself that Evgeny Morozov and the Wall Street Journal can get so many people thinking, talking, blogging, and musing about revolution on a Saturday morning!