BBC | Twitter has announced that it now has the technology to selectively block tweets on a country by country basis. In its blog, Twitter said it could "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country". But it said the removed content would be available to the rest of the world. Previously when Twitter deleted a tweet, it would disappear worldwide.

RT | Over 11 million websites have been blacklisted and banned by Google. A massive block of websites registered for free through the co.cc subdomain have been silenced after the Internet giants have determined many of them to be unfit for the Web. Google’s Matt Cutts writes on his Google Plus account that the company has the right to pull the plug on sites if they “see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality.” 11 million sites hosted on the free-host co.cc were banned as a result, after Google decided that a large chunk of the content was malicious or otherwise below par for their Internet standards.

NYT | What do Jiangsu Province, the minor pop idol Jiang Yirong and Huadong Hospital in Shanghai have in common? Over the past day, these and scores of other words and expressions have been blocked on much of the Chinese Internet, a result of the government’s unrelenting attempt to quash widespread rumors that the former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin is dead or dying.

Infowars | In a frightening example of how the state is tightening its grip around the free Internet, it has emerged that You Tube is complying with thousands of requests from governments to censor and remove videos that show protests and other examples of citizens simply asserting their rights, while also deleting search terms by government mandate.

Rawstory | In the case of former National Security Agency (NSA) executive Thomas A. Drake -- indicted last April and accused of funneling documents to an unnamed reporter at an unnamed newspaper, for stories that have not been identified -- the president's lawyers have made a unique and potentially unprecedented claim.