The Twitter Devolution (About Iran)

[Mass]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/07/the_twitter_revolution_that_wasnt

The Twitter Devolution
Before one of the major Iranian protests of the past year, a journalist in Germany showed me a list of three prominent Twitter accounts that were commenting on the events in Tehran and asked me if I know the identities of the contributors. I told her I did, but she seemed disappointed when I told her that one of them was in the United States, one was in Turkey, and the third -- who specialized in urging people to "take to the streets" -- was based in Switzerland.

Perhaps I shattered her dreams of an Iranian "Twitter Revolution." The Western media certainly never tired of claiming that Iranians used Twitter to organize and coordinate their protests following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's apparent theft of last June's elections. Even the American government seemed to get in on the act. Former U.S. national security adviser Mark Pfeifle claimed Twitter should get the Nobel Peace Prize because "without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confidant to stand up for freedom and democracy." And the U.S. State Department reportedly asked Twitter to delay some scheduled maintenance in order to allow Iranians to communicate as the protests grew more powerful.

Misreading Tehran
A Year Later: What We Got Wrong
But it is time to get Twitter's role in the events in Iran right. Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. As Mehdi Yahyanejad, the manager of "Balatarin," one of the Internet's most popular Farsi-language websites, told the Washington Post last June, Twitter's impact inside Iran is nil. "Here , there is lots of buzz," he said. "But once you look, you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves."

...

Nonetheless, the "Twitter Revolution" was an irresistible meme during the post-election protests, a story that wrote itself. Various analysts were eager to chime in about the purported role of Twitter in the Green Movement. Some were politics experts, like the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder. Others were experts on new media, like Sascha Segan of PC Magazine. Western journalists who couldn't reach -- or didn't bother reaching? -- people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets posted with tag #iranelection. 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.


...

To be clear: It's not that Twitter publicists of the Iranian protests haven't played a role in the events of the past year. They have. It's just not been the outsized role it's often been made out to be. And ultimately, that's been a terrible injustice to the Iranians who have made real, not remote or virtual, sacrifices in pursuit of justice.

[arcadian]

1. This will be completely ignored by the DUers here

who were intoxicated by the false assumption that they were actually taking place in a world shattering event, a revolution in a country unfriendly to the United States, all from the cozy comfort of their computer chairs in their homes. Guess what folks? You were had. It was all just a big disinformation campaign propped up by your very own tax dollars.

[Barack_America]

2. If nothing else, it got the Western Media to spend time on an issue they otherwise...

...would have ignored.

Of course most of the people participating were not in Iran. Of course most of the information was crap. But for the people who took the time to sift through the shit, accurate real-time information about what was going on in Iran could be found on Twitter. And yes, most of that information was originally presented in Farsi.

[Billy Burnett]

3. Remember, the Dept of State provided server farms to accommodate Twitter's planned maintenance.

Then Ahmadinejad's gov claimed the US was involved in schemes to interfere with the elections and resulting unrest.