The US has criticised a new internet decree in Vietnam that would restrict online users from discussing current affairs. The law, announced last week and due to come into force in September, says social media should only be used for "[exchanging] personal information". The US embassy in Hanoi said it was "deeply concerned" by the decree.

Five hours reading the Internet. Four hours watching television. Fourteen minutes with a print magazine. Sound about right? That's what your day looks like, according to a new study on media trends from eMarketer. The survey found that, with the rise of mobile, the U.S. media diet has crossed two thresholds: Americans are spending more time online than with TV and, for the first time ever, they're more time gazing into their phones and tablets than blinking into desktop screens in 2013.

Social media, and Twitter in particular, enables people to follow news events in real time around the world. On 31 July 2013 and into 1 August, #ZimElections became a worldwide trending topic as the voting in Zimbabwe concluded, and Zimbabweans woke up to a state of limbo. The Zimbabwe Election Commission (ZEC) was not to release the elections results until next Monday – an eternity in today’s connected world – but with a law prohibiting anyone from making pronouncements about the results, surely everyone would hold their tongues till that date?

South Korean president Park Geun-hye has issued a press release to announce that her Klout score went up. Seriously. Klout, a startup that measures influence on social media, is one of those tools that people mock in public while privately checking to see where they stand. Park, who won election by a tight margin, is obviously less bashful about it. Park’s Klout score is 82. That’s up from 65 in February, when she took office, according to a report from South Korea’s state-run Yonhap News Agency, which wrote up the press release.

American fugitive Edward Snowden was offered a job by Russia's top social networking site on Thursday, hours after the former intelligence contractor received a year-long asylum in Russia. "We invite Edward Snowden to Petersburg and will be happy if he decides to join the star team of programmers at VKontakte," Pavel Durov, one of the founders of the St. Petersburg-based VKontakte, Russia's answer to Facebook, said on his profile.

The United States on Wednesday denounced as "repulsive" an Instagram site by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying it did not reflect the reality of the civil war. The embattled Syrian leader's office took to the social media site to post pictures that include Assad greeting supporters and his wife Asma comforting the injured.

In Bahrain, all it takes is clicking on the wrong link to end up in jail. A new report prepared by Bahrain Watch, an activist organization critical of the ruling monarchy, details how the Bahraini government creates fake Twitter accounts to reveal the identity of anonymous anti-regime tweeps -- and then prosecutes them on the basis of "secret evidence."

Twitter’s announcement this week that it will create a “report abuse” button will benefit users of the social networking website’s Arabic service, which started last year. In 2012, Wojdan Shaherkani and Sarah Attar became the first Saudi females to compete at the Olympic Games. This led to their abuse on Twitter, with one user constructing the hash tag “prostitutes of the Olympics,” and another tweeting: “You [Shaherkani] do not represent the chaste Muslim women.”