Power to the tweets

ARTICLE: Twitter Is a Player In Iran's Drama, By Mike Musgrove, Washington Post, June 17, 2009

Great example of individual-level global connectivity thumping government efforts at repressing protest by--in part--cutting off its media oxygen.

Also shows that, while it's relatively easy to round up the mainstream media, it's much harder to corral the peer-to-peer stuff--again connectivity trumping Orwell.

Comments

[Dirk2112]

Two things ... First, Twitter does support Farsi. And Second, the main thing that Twitter offers is multiple access routes ... I.E. Phone aps, browser plugins, search engine gadgets, blog widgets, and dozens of sites that allow users to post into without signing onto. Which makes it very difficult for the Iranian Government to censor/block. It is water through a fence.

[Andrew in DC]

@Dirk - two good points, but youre missing the biggest one.

Twitter, despite all its "access routes" was still blocked almost immediately as the election was over. The other routes were sliced off over the first few days. In reaction to that, there has been a huge groundswell of support from the Free-IP (piratebay.org, Anonymous, other hacker-affiliated internet-based subversives) movement who have been setting up proxies faster than Iran can block them. These protestors have struck an idealist chord with these internet types and it's the support from the latter that's really keeping the Iranian protestors in the fight.

Furthermore, its pressure from these semi-organized mostly anonymous grass roots internet groups which is what's causing the MSM not only to participate, but to also acknowledge the fact that they're getting "scooped" by tweets and finally, they're keeping the MSM informed of things they're doing that are harmful to the cause (like publishing the @-names of the true iranian sources).

I think that's the biggest (and most commonly missed) story of what's going on here - at least on our side of the world.

[Dirk2112]

@Andrew

I actually agree that the groundswell you described played a huge role. My point about Twitter was that since its decentralization made it especially difficult to cut off, it fed the, well, uprising [what else can we call it] oxygen until the techies you mentioned could get in on the act.

Also, I couldn't agree more with your second paragraph more. The speed at which Twitter's trend updates move is such that it made it easy to bombard CNN and then Twitter itself [re the outage] in short order.