Bits and ballots

THE world’s first tweet was as dull as they come. “Just setting up my twttr,” wrote Jack Dorsey, now Twitter’s chief executive, on March 21st 2006. Ten years after that inauspicious start, Twitter’s 320m monthly users send hundreds of millions of tweets a day. However cloudy the firm’s current prospects, and however trivial many of those tweets may be, Twitter is part of a wider communications revolution. As this week’s shows, the internet has distributed more political power to citizens. But new technologies also carry risks.