Twitter became the pressed-for-time journalists watering hole, which looked like it would become a problem of non-verification, even early on. For real time events like natural disasters, Twitter served an information purpose which was a double-edged sword, on the one hand you may see actual events happening now. On the other you may be trolled by people who saw them before you, or like Gottfried you get fired for cracking a joke before the severity of the event is known. Twitter can't BOTH be the local pub and the window to the world at the same time it's not Schrödinger's social media, but it tries so hard.

@Gareth Hart, who brings up a very interesting point about how our lives are on the web now, which is operated by private companies, and how we interact with our governments via the private company-operated web-roads established. At a conference Internetdagarna, this was actually discussed at length with a panel of politicians and security experts, how much metadata are we allowing to leak out in interacting with the various websites, can packet sniffers see who we are and why we're logging in at the IRS? Will cookies track which pages at the medical center sites we read? (Note: In Sweden where most things are government centralized and everything is on the internet, following one individual with keylogging would potentially give you all of their information in no time at all). How should the Internet be governed in the future? How should the openness of the Internet be guaranteed and how can we meet potential information security threats?

Much like when we moved off shopping on the highstreet and into the private property malls, we forget that we give up the freedom of assembly and freedom of speech at the doors of these private entities. You can give out protest-fliers on the highstreet to no shoppers at all, or be led out of the mall of america where all the shoppers are, when you attempt to protest there. This is happening on the internet now. Collecting all your eggs in one basket, with a handful of major corporate owners, when the fundamental idea of the internet was a decentralized network is the antithesis of the original "cyberspace" idea.