The Obama Social Network

THERE was much recent publicity in Melbourne about Facebook pages naming career criminal Adrian Bayley as the killer of Jill Meagher. The police wanted them taken down for fear of prejudicial pre-trial publicity making a conviction impossible to achieve. The courts and judges were equally miffed, as were sundry politicians who lined up to condemn the public for voicing opinions about matters only their betters on the bench were said to be capable of blessing with rational consideration.

Facebook resisted for days before eventually making some efforts to gag those pages and their commenters.

But criticise Obama and some anonymous kid wearing a knitted cap deep in Facebook's bowels will silence such observations in a twinkling. Here is what Facebook has refused to allow:

It is not just governments that believe a gagged populace is a quiet populace.