What if Twitter is leading us all astray in Iran?

People will most greatly believe things they can verify themselves. Twitter + Google change the game. The sky is blue, things fall down, and a whole onslaught of cross-corroborating first-hand reports readily accessible over the web that claim a politician is dead or a company is polluting, even if those reports are intentional disinformation by their enemies.

1) If you watched any of the videos shot by foreigners and Iranians alike, you'd notice that there were at least 50 across if not more. This makes your calculation wrong by an order of magnitude. The videos are there to prove it.

2) Mousavi being under house arrest and then let out due to pressure caused by so many people marching and protesting is a more likely scenario. Don't underestimate the stupidity of snap decisions made when the reaction was unexpected.

3) The president of the election committee can dissent with the Ayatollah, even if it were dangerous for him personally to do so. Also, Ayatollah went back on his proclamation a day later and asked for an inquiry into the elections. This makes that the president's claim that much more valid.

None of these claims are unlikely, but caution must be exercised anyway. I'd rather believe the people in the streets than what someone from the media can tell me. If you don't believe me, watch the Twitter streams. There's a lot of misinformation there, but also a lot of good information. Sifting through this is a journalist's job.

2) Police have guns and fire hoses. Any of these alone is enough to control a crowd several times the size of the police force, especially the fire hoses.

3) Amanjeed (mispelled i know) is not known for employing logic. Indeed, the primary reason given by many of Mousavi's supporters was that Amanijeed was too capricious and arbitrary in his decision-making. And when you control all of the important offices and agencies (i.e., the state police and military), politics is just for show.

4) This is incorrect; the Ayatollah did not approve of the election; that is why they have launched an investigation into irregularities.

You clearly didn't put much thought into your own claims.

Washington Post estimated Ahmadinejad victory by margin of 2:1 about 3 weeks before the election based on polling data.

There are also rumors sifting out of the intelligence community that the margin was expected to be about 2:1.

Obviously the rumored intelligence report I cannot verify.

The Washington Post report is elaborated on here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8101841.stm (Just search the article text for 'Washington Post' if you are not interested in the rest.)

I'm starting to get the feeling that this was not a rigged election.

However, there is also a fair bit of data on past elections and voting trends - which the data from this election departs from remarkably.

The protests are real; the photos and video that have emerged so far are proof of that. And they have unfolded in a manner that's entirely plausible and did not require the involvement of non-Iranian third parties to get to the point they're at now. Until any plausible evidence emerges that significant numbers of tweets were forgeries, I think the more reasonable position to take is to assume they're real and Iranian. Of course, this does not mean they should be automatically believed, as like all low-level eyewitness accounts they are necessarily subject to inaccurate rumours, flawed conclusions, personal biases and all the rest, but the mere fact that many of these tweets are inaccurate does not imply that they weren't posted in Iran and it does not diminish their value in letting the rest of us know what it's like for ordinary people at street level in Iran's cities.