

The Revolution Will Be Twittered - jcsalterego
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/the-revolution-will-be-twittered-1.html

======
frisco
It's 5:30am on the East Coast and I've just been up all night, watching with
rapt attention Twitter feeds since 11pm. The media's been inexplicably out of
it (see #CNNfail, but CNN isn't the only one), but Twitter's been amazing to
watch. There's been a revolution -- who knows if it'll go anywhere, much less
be successful -- organizing in front of me. Users in Tehran debating whether
meetups are traps (the 12:30pm "Mousavi gathering" ended up being surrounded
by special police, with Mousavi nowhere in sight), and coordinating news and
rallies. Local students have been sharing paths around tear gas in and out of
dorms; what doors to avoid due to waiting unmarked vans on the other side. How
to avoid secret police going door-to-door collecting satellite dishes and
modems; cell phone service status throughout the city. It's amazing.

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...

~~~
TomOfTTB
What exactly are you watching on Twitter? Other than "There are riots in the
Tehran over the election" what more is there to say right now? Anyone who is
watching the situation knows the communication lines have been cut.

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?

~~~
frisco
Last night it was #IranElection, the keyword "Mousavi", @Change_for_Iran,
among several others.

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....](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/14/world/main5087285.shtml))

That's where Twitter -- as long as you're looking at people who are actually
there -- comes in.

~~~
tlrobinson
If you have a list of quality Twitter users you should add them here:
<http://almost.at/#iran> (click the person icon with a "+")

------
rms
[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/laura...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/laura-
secor-irans-stolen-election.html)

[http://garysick.tumblr.com/post/123070238/irans-political-
co...](http://garysick.tumblr.com/post/123070238/irans-political-coup)

<http://hashtags.org/tag/iranelection/messages>

Please don't turn this into a meta discussion about whether or not this is
hacker news.

~~~
swombat
Surely anything that involves the effect of a new technology (Twitter) on
major world events _is_ Hacker News. I don't see how anyone could argue
against it.

------
swombat
How will Twitter self-organisation fare if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard
decides to start shooting?

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.

~~~
jazzyb
"...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."

Check out tor (<http://www.torproject.org/>). It's slow, but it's the closest
thing we have to that right now.

~~~
dagobart
Despite this contributes nothing to the Iran thread, I find it amazing that
you say 'we'. I neither want to go off-topic here. But it occured to me that
people closely attached to the web tend to realize a 'we' amongst them, across
all borders.

------
tezza
Twitter will only be any good for this _flash mob_ style communication.

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.

\---

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

\---

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]

~~~
randallsquared
_How long will activists be tweeting when @IranianGuard busts down
@IranFreeNow ' s door and sprays her with bullets?_

It's when large numbers of people are willing to defy that risk that things
change.

------
spazmaster
i'm just a tad confused. if all internet and mobile lines are cut, how can
they use twitter?

~~~
randallsquared
I guess satellite internet? Or maybe the mobile only cut the voice and it
didn't occur to them that significant use could be made of SMS?

~~~
TomOfTTB
The only way I could see is through SMS using a low power satellite phone such
as this: <http://www.iridium.com/products/product.php?linx=0350>

But in a country where people live on roughly $2 a day
([http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terr...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terrorism25))
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...](http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/The_stakes_in_Iran.html)
)

Cell phone towers are what's been cut so no SMS
([http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-
SfeEO9WhpOVG6Slnu0w))

Satellite dishes have been banned since '94
(<http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34407>) so no highspeed internet that
way.

~~~
lionheart
Satellite dishes might be banned, but this doesn't mean that they aren't very
widespread. This isn't the United States or Europe.

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.

------
KC8ZKF
We might be overstating Twitter's role in this situation. Because we are
receiving so many good reports via Twitter, those of us who aren't in Iran
might be committing a type of spotlight fallacy by believing that Twitter is
having a large effect on the events themselves.

~~~
dagobart
A while back Vancouver Film School (VFS) released a short-film on how Iran
embraces new media, namely the web. The piece is titled "Iran: A Nation of
Bloggers", can be watched at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MChlT0GvFPM> .
With about 100000 (one hundred thousand) actively maintained blogs, I can
imagine Twitter indeed does play an important role there.

------
joel_feather
The united states has a huge vested interest in this reelection failing. I
prefer to withhold my opinion till I hear from BOTH sides of the conflict, and
not just from the side that aligns with western interests.

~~~
jerf
I'd have to say that at this scale, talking about the "United States" as some
sort of monolithic entity will lead to weak thinking. Some parts think the
mullahs should be lined up and shot, some are pretty comfortable with their
control, and there's everything in between, including a lot of opinions that
don't show up on this axis. Some are pretty tied into a line about Iran being
no threat, some are pretty tied into Iran (and what it represents) being a
mortal threat to all civilization.

------
Lol_Lolovici
It's interesting that something that already happened at least once is
suddenly much more interesting because it involves the Islamic world. This was
done before in Moldavia (<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/inside-
moldovas/>) but it was not that interesting for the media then because it
wasn't Muslims and nobody wanted to anger Russia at that moment.

~~~
idlewords
Moldova, not Moldavia. You've actually got it backwards - the Twitter angle
was hyped pretty hard by the media during the Moldovan protests, even though
only a small handful of protesters used the service. These kind of bromides
about [information technology of the day] enabling a new kind of revolution
are as old as the hills - I remember hearing similar stuff about fax
machines/email during the Bosnian war - and typically have little to do with
the actual messy reality, and a lot to do with wishful thinking. In the case
of Moldova, press coverage died down fast because a) the election was
contested in court and demonstrations stopped and b) some of the original
demonstrations appear to have been a provocation by the government, which
wanted an excuse to crack down. The situation got murky real fast, and with no
more easy angle on the story, the Western press lost interest.

~~~
Lol_Lolovici
I don't understand what I got backwards. I was just pointing out that this is
a very similar situation to that one (revolution, twitter, elections) and it
has the same media buzz but with the added bonus that it involves a Muslim
country hence the US media enjoys it more. Your points about that situation
are valid of course but that was not what I was saying.

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.

------
far33d
Use of proxies is quite common in Iran, and working proxy lists are being
passed around on twitter.

