This week in social media, Twitter turned eight years old and was banned in Turkey, Facebook faced off with the government over privacy (and it's the other way around this time), and Pinterest and Tumblr both got into marketing and ads. It's time for Social Media Saturday!

Twitter

Twitter celebrated its eighth birthday this week by creating a "First Tweet" site, where any logged-in Twitter user can go to see the first thing they ever tweeted (guessing for a lot of people, it's something boring like "this is my first tweet" or "testing"). Latin Post offered up an eight year retrospective on Twitter, which begins with co-founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet, which is just as mundane as everyone else's: "Just setting up my twtr" was Dorsey's first tweet in 2006, which was also the first tweet ever.

The celebrations didn't last long before more controversy for the world-wide social network that has been used by popular demonstration movements like the Arab Spring. Late this week, Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that he was banning Twitter in the country. According to the CSMonitor, the ban appears to be a reaction to a series of leaks about widespread corruption in Erdoğan's administration, just 10 days before nationwide elections.

Ironic as these attempts to control social technology tend to be, the subject of Twitter's being blocked in Turkey instantly began trending worldwide and Turkey's own President Abdullah Gul voiced his opposition to the Prime Minister's Twitter ban -- on his Twitter account.

Facebook

Facebook and the federal government are in a spat over online privacy, but this time it isn't Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling President Obama directly to complain about the National Security Agency's spying practices.

This time, it's the Federal Trade Commission saying that Facebook was wrong for ignoring state laws on teen privacy. Facebook is facing a lawsuit in California for featuring teens' "likes" in advertisements called "Sponsored Stories," a dicey move for privacy that Facebook announced in October last year. In the suit, Facebook was saying that because the federal Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) only applies to children under 12, that law, in essence, supersedes states' laws on teen privacy.

The FTC filed a brief, according to the Washington Post, on Thursday night saying that Facebook is wrong in its interpretation of COPPA and states' rights to enforce their own privacy laws for kids over 12 years old. "Nothing in the language, structure of legislative history," said the FTC, can be interpreted to "displace state protections of teenagers' online privacy in their entirety."

In the same week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was among the tech titans to visit President Obama for a second time to discuss their frustrations over the government's invasion of privacy in the form of NSA spying.

Pinterest, Tumblr Get Into Marketing

As we previously reported, Yahoo-owned Tumblr has been looking for a way to boost its revenue and spice up the now often forgotten social media platform. So they appointed a "director of media" recently, hoping to cash in on partnerships with entertainment marketers.

The first such deal was inked this week, in a television ad partnership between Tumblr and Viacom. According to Variety, the partnership will launch with the 2014 MTV Movie Awards on April 13, where MTV will post promotional content on Tumblr before the show, as well as showcasing extra media like GIFs, images, and videos during and after the awards.

Pinterest, the social image clipping network, has been testing different types of sponsored content and ads for a while, but now it's put a price on its ads: One million dollars.

That's of course not the price for one ad, but the minimum spending commitment Pinterest is looking for from prospective advertisers, according to Ad Age.

Never Heard of Tango? You Probably Will Soon

Speaking of millions of dollars, mobile instant messaging startup Tango secured $280 million in a round of funding this week -- led by the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group, which invested $215 million of that total, according to CNET.

Tango recently reached the 200+ million-user mark and is seen as a rival to WhatsApp, which Facebook recently acquired for $19 billion.

But Tango (not to be confused with Samba, a social video app which won SXSW Accelerator this year) does more than free messaging. It already offers free voice calls over the internet, something WhatsApp is about to add, along with video chatting and a number of other social and gaming features.

"This round really validates our vision of going beyond simple messaging," said Tango co-founder and CTO Eric Setton to CNET.

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