Shortly after the massacre at the Westgate Mall in Kenya, the alleged terrorists, al-Shabab, began tweeting about their motivations from the now-suspended account @HSM_Press. A handful of accounts, most tweeting in Arabic, cheered on the terrorist unit still inside the mall. After tweeting a series of names of alleged gunmen still inside the Westgate Mall, a second account, @HSM_Press2, was quickly suspended by Twitter.

The Executive Director of U.N. Women says your tweets can help stop violence against women. “I would like all those men and boys…to stand up against violence against women,” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said during the 2013 Social Good Summit Sunday. She explained that men can make a difference by “tweeting about it, hosting conversations, fighting against those sites that abuse women.”

As of last week, posting a message that the Chinese government deems inaccurate on social media platforms can get you three years in the slammer, provided it gets 500 retweets (or their equivalent) or 5,000 views. At least, that’s what the law said. But would the new policy, part of the Chinese government’s draconian crackdown on “online rumors,” be enforced?

Internet access was officially declared a right by the UN in 2011, eight years after the World Summit Information Society first met in 2003. Among their goals was to address the global digital divide; to "improve access to information and communication infrastructure and technologies as well as to information and knowledge; build capacity; increase confidence and security in the use of ICTs; create an enabling environment at all levels; develop and widen ICT applications." Despite this, a decade later, 68% of the world does not have access to internet.

China’s online community brimmed with disappointment - if not despair - on Tuesday after online media reported that Iran had granted its citizens access to Facebook and Twitter. Both sites had been walled off from Iranian users since 2009. This leaves China, along with its neighbour North Korea, among the very few countries which still block Facebook and Twitter. “Iranians are now returning to Facebook, yet we Chinese haven't even met Facebook,” one microblogger commented on Weibo.

Almost every major political figure has a social-media presence today. Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov is an Instagram addict, as is Syria’s first family. Hugo Chavez was a prolific tweeter, and Fidel Castro blogs occasionally. Iowa senator Chuck Grassley live-tweets University of Northern Iowa Panthers women’s volleyball matches. Yet nobody’s quite as strange as Iran’s Supreme Tweeter, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

An influential Communist Party journal on Monday decried online speech critical of the ruling Communist Party and government, comparing internet rumours to denunciation posters during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. “There are some who make use of the open freedom of cyberspace to engage in wanton defamation, attacking the party and the government,” said the journal Qiushi, which means ”seeking truth” in Chinese.

With Twitter set to make its debut on American stock exchanges, a critical question looms: Can toppling dictators also be good business? Over the course of its seven-year history, Twitter has gone from scrappy, disorganized start-up to a heavyweight of the social media revolution. In the process, it's become much more than a business. From Tahrir Square to Gezi Park, Twitter has made itself indispensible to activists everywhere, providing a tool to decry abuse, organize protests, and help overthrow bad leaders.