Misreading Tehran: The Twitter Devolution | Hacker News Reader

Misreading Tehran: The Twitter Devolution

foreignpolicy.com

26 pointsFlemlord11 comments

"Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."

A very simple observation, but so true, and so common-sense that you would almost overlook it.

Often it's the most obvious things that we most frequently fail to see....

Especially if we're actually looking for something different, like a raison d'être for social media in politics.

There were a lot of problems and issues in analyzing what happened last summer in Iran. With the Web Ecology Project we grabbed every tweet that we could find pertaining to the election, before and for over a month afterward. We got them all and released a paper on what we found (http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/06/iran-election-on-tw...).

We did pay attention to language issues. None of us were experts in any arabic languages, but we did make efforts to search for specific keywords in Farsi.

Another huge problem, was that so many people on Twitter changed their location in attempts to 'protect' people on the ground there. I was unconvinced from day 1 of the efficacy of this attempt, but it certainly did make data analysis on a geographic basis rather hard.

I'm sad that in the end there really was little to no effect on things in Iran. The election was rigged and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Complete revolution wasn't an option and the international community couldn't do anything either without just overthrowing the country and additionally destabilizing the area.

It's unsurprising; beyond Twitter/the Web most people outside of Iran were apathetic about it. Those who did take definite action were definitely too few to really take on an actual government.

The outcome was never really unexpected, but I think there were positives in the whole thing to be taken away. Like the idea that it;s hard for a government to cover up their actions from the rest of the world any more. Or that not even attempts to block Twitter were wholly successful.

That's unfortunately no practical use to the protesters in Iran - but it's a positive start! And I can't help wondering if the first real tech generation, as they grow, will provide a "real life" power base to actually bring online action into real world results.

Well those writing on twitter weren't to my knowledge trying to coordinate protests. They where trying to get the word out no?

Protests happen all the time, all over the world. Twitter, Youtube, definitely played a huge role in bringing the opinions/thoughts of the Iranians to the rest of the world. Its unfair to say Twitter did nothing to the revolution itself. It was not meant to do anything. Just tell you what people all over the world thought about it. And it did a bloody good job.. probably starting an info revolution of its own.

Between this and the fact that Ahmadinejad never said Israel should be wiped off the map[1], I'm beginning to think MSM reports about Iran can't be trusted.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#...

Right, he never said that Israel should be wiped off the map. He just said that an anonymous state whose capital is Jerusalem should vanish.

EDIT: that was a reply to the apologetic section of the article the OP linked to. Reading further you get a link to Iran's president website [1] which contains plainer words by Ahmadinejad .

[1] http://www.president.ir/en/?ArtID=10114

Honestly, guys, I wouldn't read too much into all of this. If you've been around "the internet" for very long, you should have a pretty finely tuned "bullshit detector".

There were a lot of people who were running proxies, and TOR exit nodes, and VPN endpoints, and FTP dumps, and soforth, and those services absolutely were used to smuggle photos and videos out of the country while things were being filtered.

Behind all of the "make your twitter pic green, set your timezone to tehran!" etc. etc. there was really amazingly good reporting happening via the internet.

Did most of it happen via twitter? Probably not, but it certainly did help things spread when they did happen...granted, if you're just watching a hashtag that anybody can tag things with...then you're probably not getting much legitimate news.

Use your mind when reading the news, this shouldn't be anything new.

I don't think this type of analysis is simply trying to shatter Western social media fantasies. It's important to know the true effect so the technology is not misapplied in future events: "they don't need our help, they have Twitter...."

I always wonder how much of the 'news' is pure spin...

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