As a diplomat, I’m fascinated by the growing trend of Foreign Ministries using social media as part of their public diplomacy tool kit. According to @DigiDiplomats 77 Foreign Ministries now have official twitter accounts, and the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office has over 120 twitter channels and 120 Facebook pages. Tweeting Ambassadors, ‘liking’ Embassy Facebook statuses, and checking out Instagram accounts of a government minister’s visit to a distant country are increasingly the norm.

Over the past few years, Sabir Nazar has emerged as Pakistan's best known cartoonist for drawing a series of cartoons that take a sharply critical look at religious orthodoxy, conspiracy theories, and misinterpretations of current affairs that feed into the Pakistani mass consciousness. Through cartoons and comments posted on the social networking site Facebook, he offers biting insights that turn commonly-held viewpoints and beliefs about Pakistan on their heads.

Turks have hit back at a new law tightening control of the internet with more than half a million tweets on the hashtag "Internet Censorship in Turkey".

Journalists covering the Sochi Olympics have taken to Twitter to air complaints over the state of their hotel rooms. For the past week, some reporters have been tweeting images describing what they say are appalling conditions in the media hotels.

Turks have hit back at a new law tightening control of the internet with more than half a million tweets on the hashtag "Internet Censorship in Turkey".

Google hasn't shied away in the past from taking political positions in its popular doodle images on its google.com homepage. Thursday's doodle is no exception. It features a rainbow-colored illustration of popular Winter Olympic sports, including alpine skiing, hockey, curling, and ice skating.

Judith Martin, the popular American columnist better known as “Miss Manners”, advocates restraint when responding to insults: “I don't believe in answering rudeness with rudeness”, she once said in an interview. In extreme circumstances, however, – such as when a man asks a woman whether she’s expecting – Martin does permit to “defend one’s own honor.”

On his first anniversary as secretary of state on Tuesday, John Kerry celebrated by reactivating his Twitter handle. “It only took a year but @StateDept finally let me have my own @Twitter account,” Mr. Kerry tweeted with the hashtag #JKTweetsAgain, as if to suggest he had been held hostage for the last year without a BlackBerry.