Governments worldwide are increasingly facing a fundamental question: how to deal with the causes of violent – often religiously motivated – extremism. They are not short of advice – and from a wide range of sources.

The United States discreetly supported the creation of a website and SMS service that was, basically, a Cuban version of Twitter, the Associated Press reported Thursday. ZunZuneo, as it was called, permitted Cubans to broadcast short text messages to each other. At its peak, ZunZuneo had 40,000 users.

"I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever," read a tweet from “The Colbert Report”last Thursday — in what New Yorker magazine commentator Jay Caspian Kang called a “comedic sin of delivering a punch line without its setup.”

The Turkish government late Thursday ordered Internet service providers to restore access to Twitter, lifting a two-week ban on the microblogging site a day after the nation's highest court ruled it illegal and an infringement on free speech.

In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government... Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans.

For the last month and a half I have been following the Ukraine crisis on my Twitter account, and it has offered an unprecedented way to get a real understanding of what people think about the situation and how they think it should be resolved. 

Earlier this month, the US Commerce Department announced a plan to back away from its last direct involvement in running the Internet. The man who made that decision, Lawrence Strickling, sees the government's role today as merely "clerical," but letting go of even that sends an important symbolic message: The Internet is all grown up now.

Tom Cochran, the Chief Technology Officer at Atlantic Media and the former Director of New Media Technologies at the White House, is joining the State Department on Monday to take the lessons of the Obama campaign and apply them to American foreign policy around the globe.