Social media profiles can be somewhat limited by privacy settings..... unless you're one of them

Personal profiles on social media sites can be personalised putting on what you want others to see and also limiting certain group of people from seeing all of the personal information such as addresses. However in Louisiana state of USA, there's a law that recently took affect forcing a certain group of people if they were to use social media, they had to put their address and physical description, and most importantly, they have to list their crimes committed on their profiles specifically crimes related to sex, as you now would've guessed, they are sex offenders. This was actually a step down from their initial ban of social media usage from sex offenders.

While the law in Louisiana was adhered to protect people by making them aware of the sex offenders' previous crimes, what they look like and where they live, it seems highly unlikely they would even register for an account considering how they will be tagged with their dark past making it impossible to start afresh, those who have accounts would probably delete their accounts in fear of shame from people they know. This law on the surface may be looking like they have eased up on the past offenders, but in reality, it's probably for monitor purposes should the past offenders choose to continue or take up on being involved in social media.

twitter's use in measurement, presidential debate sentiments

Presidential race in America has become a red hot topic in America (because they should care) and somewhat globally. After the first presidential debate between the republican Mitt Romney and the current president representing the democratic party, Barrack Obama, a lot of people seemed to think Romney won the debate according to a poll conducted by Gallup showed 72% of the people who watched the debate thought Romney won, an unprecedented approval rate. However the people of the twitterverse generally thought otherwise, with 61% of the messages related to the debate being in favour of Obama presented by the Pew Research Centre, though more of the tweets were about criticising Romney.

The entire debate lasts for around 90 minutes and could be a reason that not everyone will be watching the entirety of the debate and choose to follow updates or tweets from others for information relating to the debate. The question raised though is whether twitter can be an accurate gauge for where the sentiments of the the American population lie. For one, a lot of the tweets it may need to be interpreted between the lines, another reason is people can create an infinite amount of accounts theoretically, making it hard to conduct an accurate measure of the American's preferences.