I doubt that the business plan for Twitter said anything about being a news channel during a political upheaval, but Twitter is clearly becoming a major source of information about what is happening in Iran. I was stunned by how quickly email and social media have taken over due to Iranian government controls. (This image was found at Time.com) I am also amazed at how quickly Iranians use twitter to get around the controls.
First, a recap. Reports are that cell phone text messaging has been turned off nation-wide. Journalists who had visas to cover the elections have been told to leave the country. Journalists with permanent press cards have been told NOT to film in the streets. One report said that plain clothes police are instantly arresting anyone seen with a camera, even a cell phone camera, in the streets.
OpenNet Initiative--a research project on Internet censorship conducted jointly by Harvard, Toronto, Oxford, and Cambridge universities--reported that YouTube, Twitter, DailyMotion and Facebook, along with several Web sites aligned with opposition candidates, have been blocked in Iran in recent days. (Nieuws in the Netherlands.)
Yet, people on the street are defying the ban, finding work arounds, and are getting the word out.
"We are receiving videos, we are receiving emails, phone calls and text messages, not only from Tehran from other cities around the country. So we get a picture of what is happening outside of Tehran," said senior analyst at BBC Persian, Sadeq Saba, according to AFP. Yesterday, CNN's Situation Room coverage of Tehran was predominantly done in the studio by CNN's Internet correspondent Abbi Tatton. She has clearly been thrown into the limelight: CNN Coverage.
But, most interesting to me is Time Magazine's coverage that explains how Twitter works for this coverage and how email is less effective:
"Twitter (is) practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of email and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does," Time says. The article includes some examples of Tweets from Iran:
- Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents, took her daughter
- Ashora platoons now moving from valiasr toward National Tv staion. mousavi's supporters are already there. my father is out there!
So, how come Twitter isn't blocked as so many Iranian sites are? Time explains:
"Sympathetic observers outside Iran have set up "proxies," servers that relay Twitter content into Iran through network addresses that haven't been blocked yet. When the Iranian authorities discover such a proxy, they block it too. It's an arms race crossed with whack-a-mole. Protesters are also organizing denial-of-service attacks against government websites — coordinated efforts to shut down their servers by flooding them with traffic."
I recommend the Time coverage entitled, "Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement". The revolution may have found its match.
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