The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of "a simple misunderstanding".

The explanation did not, however, calm the bloggers. "There was an outcry by some members after MySpace's acquisition by News Corp. People were afraid they might start monitoring or censoring MySpace," Ellis Yu wrote to the Blog Herald. "At the time, their CEO said nothing like that would happen. Well, now it has. MySpace was built on an open community and now they're trying to censor us, putting business interests above its members!"

I'm pretty sure I'm on the record, somewhere, predicting News Corp would do just this kind of thing. MySpace is, and will continue to be, a journey in learning about the necessary dynamics of Social Networking sites, and not the final solution to the online community.

Mr Murdoch, 74, last week appointed 33-year-old Jeremy Philips to run News Corp's internet strategy and armed him with a $1bn fund to buy more sites.

Let me give my complete assurance that Industrial Memetics will never entertain a buyout offer from News Corp.

Myspace stumbles