But then I started to think a bit about what makes social media different to the average talk in a bar, and the more I thought about it the clearer it became that we’re talking about two entirely different social phenomena and that censorship rules must be updated to content with the rise of big communication. Two main things seem to set social media apart from traditional communication.

Imagine a football match. The crowd’s chanting and shouting, people are clapping and stamping their feet, and in short it would take a long time for any message to spread through the tens of thousands of people. And if any message could be spread, by the time it got round the stadium it would be changed, if not ruined, by a Chinese whispers effect. But now, with social media, ideas can be grouped easily and efficiently into trending topics and shared among not thousands, but millions of people in seconds, without being changed beyond recognition along the way.

Trending topics are an immensely powerful tool. Twitter uses them to great effect and Google+ also incorporates them into its newsfeed. This feature has the potential to be much more than just a rundown of the main topics circulating on the site and just needs the right circumstances to flourish into a tool that allows masses of people to organise themselves. This is precisely what we saw in August 2011 in the riots that brought chaos to the streets of Tottenham, London. Hashtags were used to group tweets together and some people even posted things that weren’t true just to stir up the situation.

And the discussion certainly didn’t end with the crises in 2011 in Egypt and London. Recently the question of freedom of speech has surfaced again in the press due to the ongoing Leveson Enquiry taking place in the UK. The enquiry was launched in response to the News International phone-hacking scandal and according to its official website it will make recommendations on the “future of press regulation and governance” that are consistent with maintaining freedom of the press.

But the big issue regarding social media is the way and the extent to which it’ll be censored. I see two broad options for censorship of sites such as Twitter.

• Either we can regulate what is said
• or we can regulate where things are said.

Our freedom of speech will inevitably suffer, as we saw this week with the release of China’s points system for the Chinese version of Twitter. According to Mashable, users will start off with 80 points and they will lose some of these every time they post anything that harms the ‘unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity of the nation‘.

Now this seems like a harsh line to take and I can’t see any such system being adopted any time soon by democratic countries, but if you imagine such censorship being employed in times of emergency on social media channels, it could be one way of preventing things from getting out of hand. Of course, to prevent the system from being abused the situations under which such restrictions could be imposed would have to be defined very clearly.

Freedom of speech will remain largely in tact. People will be able to say what they like, but authorities would be able to cut off conversation on social media in specific locations where extreme situations could potentially arise. A recent anti-government demonstration by the 15M movement in Madrid shows how this tactic contains a situation while still allowing people total freedom of speech.

The crowds began gathering around 2pm and by 8pm, when crowds in excess of 30,000 converged on Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, mobile phone coverage went down. Whether this was an intentional outage or whether the networks were simply overloaded within a radius of about a mile is unclear, but the effect was the same. The crowds still felt able to participate in the demonstration, to voice their demands and express their discontent. The only thing they were prevented from doing due to the outage was gathering on social networks where ideas and sentiments would be able to spread like wildfire and where they’d potentially be able to organize themselves.

To me the second option seems by far the most appealing of the two. Regulating where things are said functions in much the same way as breaking up large gatherings of people in public places, which is totally legal and necessary to prevent outbreaks of violence. Having such a large concentration of people in one small area with access to online tools that facilitate communication and organisation could after all be highly dangerous.

I don’t think many would disagree that freedom of speech is a defining factor of western society and one that most are very proud of, and opting for a method of regulation that still preserves our freedom to express our beliefs seems both sensible and advisable. One thing is clear, though, and that is that the rules surrounding the press need to be updated to accommodate the scale that social media is taking on.

The system we have in place is designed for newspapers, radio and television, not for the internet.

The censorship of social media is obviously a huge topic with wide implications and can be viewed from many different angles. Obviously the one I have taken here is just one of many; but the geographical regulation of social media under extreme circumstances seems a reasonable measure to take, and one that provides a favourable ratio of  civil protection to loss of libery.

But one opinion really isn’t enough, so let’s open the discussion up to the floor.

Images by hozinja, marc_smith and bixentro