Yesterday it was Facebook with its most shared links of 2011.

Today it’s Twitter with its “most important”.

Among the mix is “Welcome back Egypt #Jan25” for the Arab Spring and “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)” which foretold the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. 

So too is “my daughter her name is sarah m. rivera,” sent out by a homeless man in New York who hadn’t seen his daughter in 11 years. They were reunited the next day.

On Tuesday Facebook released a 2011 top 40 list of the its most shared articles in the United States.

Coming in at number 1: Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami from the New York Times.

Rounding out the list at number 40: Steve Jobs’s Patents, also from the New York Times.

In between are articles and videos such as Laughing Baby Loves Ripping Paper! (at number 30 from Yahoo) and Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps (at number 4 from CNN).

While the sample size is small, we thought looking at percentage shares by company would be interesting.  It’s not much of a surprise that familiar names dominate the list but we’ll dig around and see if we can get a larger sample and see what that might hold.

Via the Register:

The country’s Information and Communications Technology minister, Anudith Nakornthap, said that if such users “share” or “like” articles on Facebook that are considered to insult the Thai royal family, they could face sentences of between three and 15 years in jail – as laid out in Thailand’s Computer Crimes Act.

According to AFP, the dominant social network was asked to remove over 10,000 pages of material that contained images or text that the Thai ministry said was “offensive” to the monarchy.

It’s not just social networks that fall under watchful eyes. A 61-year-old man was recently convicted of sending four text messages that officials believed were offensive to the royal family.

His sentence: 20 years in jail… or, five years per offending message.

Liu is talking about the country’s inability to control and censor communication across social networks. Of particular concern is Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, which currently has about 400 million users.

The country is famous for its Great Firewall and thirty-plus thousand censors that investigate Web sites and join message boards to either delete comments or spin government messages their own way. But trying to do the same to the Chinese equivalent of Twitter posts has escaped the censors.

As the Sydney Morning Herald notes, “As quickly as [censors] delete individual messages, they find they have already been spread by hundreds, or thousands, of others.”

Proposed solution: Throw more censors at the “problem”. Sina just hired a thousand people to monitor messages across its network.

Via the Sydney Morning Herald:

China’s Communist Party has set out to curtail social networking following years of unfettered growth after its top committee issued an edict launching a new drive to control open messaging.

Websites such as Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, have been allowed to grow explosively, with 400 million Chinese posting opinions and sharing information.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party, a 300-strong body of party, state and army leaders, has signalled its alarm that there is no equivalent to the Great Firewall that marshals the internet. It has promised to “strengthen the guidance and administration of social internet services and instant communications tools” to ensure “orderly dissemination of information”.

Anyone spreading “false rumours” was threatened with stern punishment.

According to the Vancouver Sun, punishment includes arrest:

Already a number of people have been put under what China calls “administrative detention,” usually 15 days under arrest. One was accused of writing a fake report about changes to the income tax system. A student was jailed for claiming that cancer had killed eight village officials in Yunnan. A third was detained for writing that a Chinese jet had crashed.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project

In politics, size matters.

How large is the mailing list, how much money was raised and, increasingly, how many friends, followers and other social networking whatnot all becomes valuable lucre in the media’s horse race coverage of the next election.

Enter Newt Gingrich.

A social media mastermind proclaims an astonished press as it looks at his 1.3 million plus Twitter followers. 

Yet, like most things, what we see is not necessarily true. Mashable reports that over 90% of Gingrich’s Twitter followers aren’t even human. It appears that he’s been paying to build up his overall number count but instead of people he’s getting robots, zombies and the undead following him.

Image: Robot Runamuck by Bob Canada via Flickr.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.