By the end of the first day of the trial, more than 600,000 postings that included Bo Xilai's name had accumulated on the Weibo site, although it was impossible to say how many were put there on Thursday.
It's unclear how many users are being invited into the early tests so far, but it appears to still be a rather limited trial given social media postings and other tips.
In 2013, US District Judge Kurt Engelhardt ruled they deserved a new trial because prosecutors' anonymous online postings tainted the judicial process.
In Egypt, on Sunday April 10th, a blogger, Mikael Sanad Nabil, was sentenced to three years in prison for "insulting the military" in his blog postings, after a brief trial by a military court with no defence lawyers present.
The defendants, who came to be known as the Four Gentlemen of Beijing, were convicted during a trial that relied on their Internet postings advocating political liberalization and the written testimony of three friends who later recanted those accounts.
An Arkansas judge decided that a juror's postings to Twitter.com during a civil trial would not affect a $12.6 million judgment in the case.
As part of the qualitative research process, 11 out of the 27 classes completed during the trial period were purposively selected for analysis of postings to the difficult emotions and problem solving sections of the discussion centre as these were the sections where there was most interaction between the participants and facilitators.
The postings included several that said the trials of two detained reformers — Ahmad Zeidabadi and Feyzollah Arabsorkhi — had been postponed because the men had been hospitalized, fueling speculation that they had been tortured while in custody.
The head of the judiciary in England and Wales ruled Monday that observers can send Twitter postings and text messages from courtrooms while trials are in session, so long as the messages do not impede the judicial process.
At the trial, the prosecutor read the jurors one of the cautionary postings that was on Facebook.
