Twitter power

Paddy Smith...our gizmo guru keeping you up to speed

Oh, look, twitter's done it again.

Yet another government falls to the social network's mighty sword - this time the British.

See, government in Britain isn't just about behaving like a schoolboy and getting paid for it while claiming your mistress on expenses. It's about doing what the papers tell you to do.

For those of you who aren't from Britain, or haven't studied its gory history, the small island group used to be ruled by kings and queens. After much beheading and corruption, the people had enough and staged a revolt.

This led to a democratically elected government, in the loosest sense of the phrase. If you were rich, you got extra votes. If you were poor, female or thought a bit of a fool, you didn't get any.

The happy aristocracy went on ruling the land just as it always had. What could go wrong?

Twitter could go wrong. Or, to be more accurate, the first attempt at twitter could go wrong. It was called the printing press.

It allowed you to spread any message (bad or good) to many people.

You could champion a cause and people would join you. Britain, for instance, ended up with a proper democracy.

It was a proper democracy because it came to have something quite rare: a free press.

But who watches the watcher?

Apparently, the competition does: the Guardian, the only British newspaper to openly consider its website more important than its print edition, took down - with a lot of help from twitter - the UK's biggest newspaper, the News of the World.

Although British PM David Cameron has fired a warning shot across social media's bow by saying the inquest into phone hacking will cover all media - social or otherwise - the whole debacle is a great example of the internet striking again.

It shows us that its ability to join whole countries - maybe eventually the world - is peerless in the modern age.

History rewrites itself again, this time with technology at its fore.