The Revolution Will Be Twittered

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/the-revolution-will-be-twittered-1.html

by jcsalterego • 17 years ago

42 41 17 years ago

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

frisco2• 17 years ago

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...

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

Great picture. Thanks for the link.

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.

diN0bot• 17 years ago

it is real "reality tv". i think that keeps it a tad more honest and a ton more interesting.

TomOfTTB2• 17 years ago

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?

frisco2• 17 years ago

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.

rms• 17 years ago

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/laura...

http://garysick.tumblr.com/post/123070238/irans-political-co...

http://hashtags.org/tag/iranelection/messages

Please don't turn this into a meta discussion about whether or not this is hacker news.

swombat2• 17 years ago

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.

swombat2• 17 years ago

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.

jazzyb• 17 years ago

"...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.

dagobart3• 17 years ago

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.

tphyahoo• 17 years ago

That's an interesting idea.

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.

spazmaster• 17 years ago

i'm just a tad confused. if all internet and mobile lines are cut, how can they use twitter?

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

I guess satellite internet? Or maybe the mobile only cut the voice and it didn't occur to them that significant use could be made of SMS?

nir• 17 years ago

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)

TomOfTTB2• 17 years ago

The only way I could see is through SMS using a low power satellite phone such as this: http://www.iridium.com/products/product.php?linx=0350

But in a country where people live on roughly $2 a day (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terr...) I doubt many have $1,400 satellite phones that cost $6 a day to use.

Other methods are impossible...

Twitter is blocked through regular internet (see Michael C. McHugh comment here: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/The_stakes_in_Ir... )

Cell phone towers are what's been cut so no SMS (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-...)

Satellite dishes have been banned since '94 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34407) so no highspeed internet that way.

jimfl• 17 years ago

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.

smhinsey2• 17 years ago

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.

[edit]

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.

bilbo0s• 17 years ago

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.

pygy• 17 years ago

Text messenges were shut on the election day, but turned on later on. Other communication media went off then on with various time frames.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

Clearly not all lines are cut as new videos keep showing up on youtube.

dasil003• 17 years ago

Is everyone here so young (and I'm only 31 mind you) that you've never heard of land lines?

Not so much directed at the parent as all the responses.

pageman3• 17 years ago

exactly. you can actually set-up a dial-down (callback service) to setup an internet connection.

dagobart3• 17 years ago

I thought so too, but I don't grasp how a stationary "Twitter access point" would be of use while the revolution is going on at the street.

pageman3• 17 years ago

http://twitter.com/persiankiwi/status/2169483495

"I am accessing twitter from 148.233.239.24 Port:80 in tehran. you can avoid gov filters from here. spread to others. #Iranelection"

oj_ettena• 17 years ago

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

tezza2• 17 years ago

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.

---

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

---

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? [last message]

tezza2• 17 years ago

Twitter is different to Radio. In a worse way ::

A radio transmission is a single-point-in-time event. So once you have broadcast, you leave no trace.

Twitter leaves a trail, which can be monitored post-facto by the enemy. Presumably they could sit and wait and list who reads each tweet too.

Twitter readers aren't going to be happy with this.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

How long will activists be tweeting when @IranianGuard busts down @IranFreeNow ' s door and sprays her with bullets?

It's when large numbers of people are willing to defy that risk that things change.

joel_feather• 17 years ago

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.

jerf• 17 years ago

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.

KC8ZKF• 17 years ago

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.

dagobart3• 17 years ago

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.

Lol_Lolovici2• 17 years ago

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.

idlewords• 17 years ago

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.

Lol_Lolovici2• 17 years ago

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.

far33d• 17 years ago

Use of proxies is quite common in Iran, and working proxy lists are being passed around on twitter.

The Revolution Will Be Twittered

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