Th growing wave of global protests against the Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia following revelations that they supplied the Iranian Government with network monitoring systems (which allegedly resulted in the rounding up and ‘disappearance’ of many Iranian bloggers in the past 3 weeks), once again casts questions over the ethical practises of global brands. Only last year Google found itself at the centre of a wave of negative publicity after they pandered to Chinese Government demands to filter keyword searches on the Chinese version of Google, meaning that people could not search about topics including the Tinannemen Square massacre, the troubles Tibet or any other grey areas of the Chinese regime human rights record.
Brands have an ethical responsibility to protect those within the social media spectrum and also to ensure freedom of speech is upheld as a central beacon of digital democracy. We live in an increasing ‘big brother’ society where our every move is tracked by Government intelligence agencies. The Governments of Iran and China lost the trust of their people long ago. Brands must be seen to adhere to a unwritten code of social media ethics if they are to not to lose their consumers trust too.

For over 24 hours thousands of exiled Tamils have been gathered in Parliament Square, London, calling on Western governments to intervene in the ongoing crisis in Sri Lanka. With emotions running high one Tamil man has even thrown himself into the River Thames to bring attention to their cause.

As former colonial power to both India and Sri Lanka, the British Government have a moral obligation to help the Tamil people. For too long now they have suffered grave human rights violations from the Sri Lankan military, and urgent action is required with the current conflict to prevent a full scale humanitarian crisis.

Sri Lanka’s government has rejected calls for a ceasefire with the Tamil Tiger rebel group, and the UN estimates that 150,000 people are trapped in Sri Lanka’s northern war zone.