It's 5:30am on the East Coast and I've just been up all night, watching with rapt attention Twitter feeds since 11pm. The media's been inexplicably out of it (see #CNNfail, but CNN isn't the only one), but Twitter's been amazing to watch. There's been a revolution -- who knows if it'll go anywhere, much less be successful -- organizing in front of me. Users in Tehran debating whether meetups are traps (the 12:30pm "Mousavi gathering" ended up being surrounded by special police, with Mousavi nowhere in sight), and coordinating news and rallies. Local students have been sharing paths around tear gas in and out of dorms; what doors to avoid due to waiting unmarked vans on the other side. How to avoid secret police going door-to-door collecting satellite dishes and modems; cell phone service status throughout the city. It's amazing.
Edit: There's one picture that sums it up: http://twitpic.com/7c85l At least she's facing people, not tanks. Hopefully she's still around...
What exactly are you watching on Twitter? Other than "There are riots in the Tehran over the election" what more is there to say right now? Anyone who is watching the situation knows the communication lines have been cut.
As for CNN they did report on it during their news casts. What else would you have them do? They have no footage (cameras are being confiscated), no direct communication with reporters and therefore no accurate information. So there's nothing really to report (other than people on Twitter who are either making things up or regurgitating news reports that repeat the same known facts over and over again)
Do you really want a media that reports on something even though they have no facts?
Last night it was #IranElection, the keyword "Mousavi", @Change_for_Iran, among several others.
Yes, there are rumors going around, but if you found the right users there were definitely people right there, standing on the streets. That strikes me as more credible than reporters which aren't necessarily getting the whole story, especially if foreign press is being asked to leave the country.
"Mackell says the crackdown on protests has also extended to journalists, making it almost impossible for the media to cover the story. "I saw yesterday a Japanese camera crew who have full government permission and were working with an approved government translator, still were beaten and arrested by the police for filming at a protest. That kind of thing is happening to a lot of people. Journalists are having their cameras taken." (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/14/world/main5087285....)
That's where Twitter -- as long as you're looking at people who are actually there -- comes in.
Twitter gives a sense of immediacy and importance to, well, rather mundane things. I wonder if it might be magnifying the effect here. After all, even a few thousand temporarily upset people many times don't amount to much than a few protests.
I don't know one way or the other -- just speculating that Twitter may actually out-do cable news in hyping news stories. Whatever happens, it will be interesting to watch the mix of technology and society.
Surely anything that involves the effect of a new technology (Twitter) on major world events is Hacker News. I don't see how anyone could argue against it.
How will Twitter self-organisation fare if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard decides to start shooting?
It's great that the Iranian people can self-organise despite all the attempted censorship of the government, and certainly the free flow of information is a powerful tool in the hands of the people... but guns are powerful tools too.
It's also curious why they did not clamp down on Twitter. After all, the Chinese government had no trouble shutting down Twitter along with all the other tools of communication.
Here's another thought: if things like Twitter are such a powerful agent of change, perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter.
With all that said, I wish the best of luck to the Iranian people, and I hope they prevail. This is a historic moment, and I hope their victory without bloodshed.
"...perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter."
Check out tor (http://www.torproject.org/). It's slow, but it's the closest thing we have to that right now.
Despite this contributes nothing to the Iran thread, I find it amazing that you say 'we'. I neither want to go off-topic here. But it occured to me that people closely attached to the web tend to realize a 'we' amongst them, across all borders.
What if the bad-guy governments use these proxies themselves to spam/dos and generally behave badly.
Proxies get blacklisted.
Government can get back to rounding people up.
I guess at some point, if you're going to try to overthrow the government, you have to reach out to your neighbor and take to the streets, regardless to what technology you have available.
Twitter will only be any good for this flash mob style communication.
To that end it seems to have replaced pirate radio / ham radio.
:: Back then the problems were the same: Listeners had to be listening on the same channel, they had to have listening equipment, and they needed to act on the information. People broadcasting had the problem of being traced and executed
Strategy, tactics cannot be discussed via an open channel.
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Relating to the blog post, it details a quite lame call-to-action. This had little risk for the participant [tweeter or complier]. It was the tweet equivalent of "Honk if you hate Ahmedinejad":: Honking ensues
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How long will activists be tweeting when @IranianGuard busts down @IranFreeNow ' s door and sprays her with bullets?
@IranFreeNow: Loud knock @ door, maybe my comrades?
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i probably don't have any info you don't (assuming you're following the story) but i do know that satellite dishes are very common in the middle east. it wouldn't surprise me if satellite phone and internet service are equally popular, particularly among the set of people who are most likely to be involved in twitter.
that said, i'm sure there are a lot of fakes out there right now, but there are those who do seem legitimate enough that the information from them is worth weighing against everything else as we try to understand this situation for ourselves.
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as with all news stories involving dubious sources, it's important that you establish a set of baseline facts of the situation that you can use to help evaluate the credibility of what you see. for example, if they mention eating breakfast, make sure it's not 6pm where they claim to be. if they mention locations, do what you can to verify them. fact check to the extent that you can. this won't keep you from being duped by a motivated person, but it can help you establish a comfort level with respect to how far you are willing to trust what you've learned. if something doesn't seem right, it probably isn't, but keep in mind that cultural and language barriers can dull your sense of deception.
I wish I could upvote you more. I am learning Farsi right now, so naturally I am trying to follow all of the happenings in Iran as best I can. There is an interesting exchange on CNN, for instance, that is really disturbing me.
Christiane Amanpour asked M. Ahmedinejad if he would guarantee the safety of his rival. He said everyone is equal under the law, Mousavi would get a fine just like anyone else. Which is a strange answer to that question, almost like he was answering a different question. At any rate, CNN reported it as "Ahmedinejad declines to guarantee rival's safety".
Well, I speak a lot of languages, one of them is French. A while later I was bouncing around lemonde.fr and got to another version of the same exchange. Only this time the translations were audible. The translation for safety was strange, it was not safety, it was a phrase akin to 'safety from law'. Now my Farsi is terrible, so maybe 'safety' is always translated this way. I would need more info to know, just like you said.
It does leave me with troubling questions though. Why does CNN not air the translations? It's probably perfectly innocent because Christiane Amanpour looked confused as well. So I wonder, was the translator making translations that confused more than just me? Given the confusion evident in this whole exchange, why did CNN report it as it did?
I think this is a textbook case of what you are talking about. Because, for me, the '... cultural and language barriers...' are dulling my sense of deception. That said, I can tell that something is out of place with a lot of the reporting around this issue.
I actually watched that exchange live on CNN and was really confused by it. Have you come across any good accounts of what was really going on there? I'm particularly curious about what was going on while she restated her question, it seemed like the translator was almost trying to shout her down. I am pretty sure she is at least conversant enough to know what was being said natively without translation.
IIRC cutting off SMS was one of the first things the government did. SMS was even disabled a day before the elections with the formal explanation of preventing last minute campaigning.
The article seems a bit hyper. "As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived." - does Sullivan think Twitter has some uniquely resilient technology? Twitter will survive right until whoever's in charge takes the 10 seconds to put twitter.com into Iran's blocked sites list (or, you know, the next the fail whale)
Satellite dishes might be banned, but this doesn't mean that they aren't very widespread. This isn't the United States or Europe.
I believe there was an article in the NY Times about this exact issue. Everybody "middle-class" and up has a satellite dish. Every few months the government confiscates them, at which point everybody goes to the local black market dealer, buys a new one and puts it back up. Quite often the new one is their old one because usually the black market dealer is whoever is in charge of the local branch of the satellite dish confiscation agency.
Ah, reminds me of the bad old days in the Soviet Union.
we used to have Thuraya phones in Afghanistan for emergencies (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090421134111AA...) - if they satellite you are trying to upload to DOESN'T point to the horizon, you could have your satellite pointing to the sky on the roof and people would be none the wiser.
I agree. There's something about this story which strains credulity. But we're in the early phases of what seems to be a significant news story, and so in the rush to scoop, careful analysis is rarely job #1.
You'll not find much echo on jpost anymore, it/Israel/USA being interferingaccused by I./O.wantsI.talk. Couldn't see anymore whether they'd posted my WED written abt Habibi's "war ./. God" (intestinalrage, notGodwhocheated, youDARE hang them!!!) tostopthemasJ.M.Jordan/Germany. Godblessyou + the24
We might be overstating Twitter's role in this situation. Because we are receiving so many good reports via Twitter, those of us who aren't in Iran might be committing a type of spotlight fallacy by believing that Twitter is having a large effect on the events themselves.
A while back Vancouver Film School (VFS) released a short-film on how Iran embraces new media, namely the web. The piece is titled "Iran: A Nation of Bloggers", can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MChlT0GvFPM . With about 100000 (one hundred thousand) actively maintained blogs, I can imagine Twitter indeed does play an important role there.
The united states has a huge vested interest in this reelection failing. I prefer to withhold my opinion till I hear from BOTH sides of the conflict, and not just from the side that aligns with western interests.
I'd have to say that at this scale, talking about the "United States" as some sort of monolithic entity will lead to weak thinking. Some parts think the mullahs should be lined up and shot, some are pretty comfortable with their control, and there's everything in between, including a lot of opinions that don't show up on this axis. Some are pretty tied into a line about Iran being no threat, some are pretty tied into Iran (and what it represents) being a mortal threat to all civilization.
It's interesting that something that already happened at least once is suddenly much more interesting because it involves the Islamic world. This was done before in Moldavia (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/inside-moldovas/) but it was not that interesting for the media then because it wasn't Muslims and nobody wanted to anger Russia at that moment.
Moldova, not Moldavia. You've actually got it backwards - the Twitter angle was hyped pretty hard by the media during the Moldovan protests, even though only a small handful of protesters used the service. These kind of bromides about [information technology of the day] enabling a new kind of revolution are as old as the hills - I remember hearing similar stuff about fax machines/email during the Bosnian war - and typically have little to do with the actual messy reality, and a lot to do with wishful thinking. In the case of Moldova, press coverage died down fast because a) the election was contested in court and demonstrations stopped and b) some of the original demonstrations appear to have been a provocation by the government, which wanted an excuse to crack down. The situation got murky real fast, and with no more easy angle on the story, the Western press lost interest.
I don't understand what I got backwards. I was just pointing out that this is a very similar situation to that one (revolution, twitter, elections) and it has the same media buzz but with the added bonus that it involves a Muslim country hence the US media enjoys it more. Your points about that situation are valid of course but that was not what I was saying.
It's funny you should correct the way I wrote the country name. I know the proper name but I chose to write it like most English users would know it.
Edit: There's one picture that sums it up: http://twitpic.com/7c85l At least she's facing people, not tanks. Hopefully she's still around...