Has Twitter grown up too fast?

The Daily Mail has always had a difficult relationship with technology and the Internet. It is never long before an article that describes 'evil-doers' online threatening the safety of our children surfaces with accompanied 'ban the internet' undertone. NMA recently debated the digital industry's lack of experience in understanding its responsibilities when launching mass communication media in a web 2.0 era. The discovery that prostitutes and pornographic actresses are asking fans to 'follow them on twitter' is a little shocking but hardly surprising. The debate about protecting children from possible exposure to these corners of a social interaction website is both a valid and an urgent discussion. The debate about whether Twitter's owners should have pre-empted this is also valid. However the gutter press is mentally invalid in suggesting that the digital sphere is somehow the creator of all things lucid. The internet has changed the way we live through a revolution in information access and in interest-group interaction. Just because some less attractive aspects of our society also exist online, does not give authority to legislating and controlling the distribution of online information. The internet is an eco system of data. In that eco system there will be swans as well as vultures. Consider the effect of regulating the internet in the way dictatorships now do, as sending our society backwards not to halcyon days, but to dark ages.