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Comment by svlla | Hacker News Reader

about as 'key' as twitter I'm guessing...

Yeah, I wonder how much the online element of these revolutions is overblown by the western media. Tunisia is credited to WikiLeaks, Iran was "the Twitter revolution", and this is being credited to facebook. I'd love to know how central a role they're actually playing, or if it's just something for the media to latch on to.

I keep seeing conflicting information about this, but my impression is that the rise of independent television (Al Jazeera) has had the deeper impact so far.

Edit: does anyone here know whether Al Jazeera has typically been censored by states in the region? I mean, of course, before the recent revolts. If not, why not? It seems obvious that a population with random access to independent news media is highly undesirable if you're their dictator.

The only way to censor unencrypted satellite channels is to either ban the dishes for your own citizens, or go to a foreign country with lots of guns and persuade them to stop broadcasting. Neither is a very attractive proposition.

Regimes like the taliban and saddam hussein's iraq do ban dishes, along with almost everything else.

"Yes, we may have helped Tunisia, Egypt. But let us not forget the elephant in the room: Al Jazeera + sat dishes" - http://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/31448923629420544

I can't help but note the underhanded self-praise in this statement. It's quite typical, unfortunately.

Several after-the-fact analyses of the Iranian "Twitter Revolution" concluded that it had minimal, if any, impact. Most of the tweets were retweets or were tweets by supporters, but almost none of the tweets were actually from within Iran.

http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/06/iran-election-on-tw...

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/evalua...

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc200...

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