The Revolution Will Be Twittered
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Check out tor (http://www.torproject.org/). It's slow, but it's the closest thing we have to that right now.
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.
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.
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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
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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]
It's when large numbers of people are willing to defy that risk that things change.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I believe there was an article in the NY Times about this exact issue. Everybody "middle-class" and up has a satellite dish. Every few months the government confiscates them, at which point everybody goes to the local black market dealer, buys a new one and puts it back up. Quite often the new one is their old one because usually the black market dealer is whoever is in charge of the local branch of the satellite dish confiscation agency.
Ah, reminds me of the bad old days in the Soviet Union.
Not so much directed at the parent as all the responses.
"I am accessing twitter from 148.233.239.24 Port:80 in tehran. you can avoid gov filters from here. spread to others. #Iranelection"
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.