
Misreading Tehran: The Twitter Devolution - Flemlord
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/07/the_twitter_revolution_that_wasnt?sms_ss=reddit
======
pinstriped_dude
"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."

A very simple observation, but so true, and so common-sense that you would
almost overlook it.

~~~
tibbon
There were a lot of problems and issues in analyzing what happened last summer
in Iran. With the Web Ecology Project we grabbed every tweet that we could
find pertaining to the election, before and for over a month afterward. We got
them all and released a paper on what we found
([http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/06/iran-election-on-
tw...](http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/06/iran-election-on-twitter/)).

We did pay attention to language issues. None of us were experts in any arabic
languages, but we did make efforts to search for specific keywords in Farsi.

Another huge problem, was that so many people on Twitter changed their
location in attempts to 'protect' people on the ground there. I was
unconvinced from day 1 of the efficacy of this attempt, but it certainly did
make data analysis on a geographic basis rather hard.

I'm sad that in the end there really was little to no effect on things in
Iran. The election was rigged and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Complete revolution wasn't an option and the international community couldn't
do anything either without just overthrowing the country and additionally
destabilizing the area.

~~~
ErrantX
It's unsurprising; beyond Twitter/the Web most people outside of Iran were
apathetic about it. Those who did take definite action were definitely too few
to really take on an actual government.

The outcome was never really unexpected, but I think there were positives in
the whole thing to be taken away. Like the idea that it;s hard for a
government to cover up their actions from the rest of the world any more. Or
that not even attempts to block Twitter were wholly successful.

That's unfortunately no practical use to the protesters in Iran - but it's a
positive start! And I can't help wondering if the first real tech generation,
as they grow, will provide a "real life" power base to actually bring online
action into real world results.

------
wicknicks
Protests happen all the time, all over the world. Twitter, Youtube, definitely
played a huge role in bringing the opinions/thoughts of the Iranians to the
rest of the world. Its unfair to say Twitter did nothing to the revolution
itself. It was not meant to do anything. Just tell you what people all over
the world thought about it. And it did a bloody good job.. probably starting
an info revolution of its own.

------
ronnoch
Between this and the fact that Ahmadinejad never said Israel should be wiped
off the map[1], I'm beginning to think MSM reports about Iran can't be
trusted.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#.22Wiped_off_the_map.22_or_.22Vanish_from_the_pages_of_time.22_translation)

~~~
Amnon
Right, he never said that Israel should be wiped off the map. He just said
that an anonymous state whose capital is Jerusalem should vanish.

EDIT: that was a reply to the apologetic section of the article the OP linked
to. Reading further you get a link to Iran's president website [1] which
contains plainer words by Ahmadinejad .

[1] <http://www.president.ir/en/?ArtID=10114>

------
blhack
Honestly, guys, I wouldn't read _too_ much into all of this. If you've been
around "the internet" for very long, you should have a pretty finely tuned
"bullshit detector".

There were a lot of people who were running proxies, and TOR exit nodes, and
VPN endpoints, and FTP dumps, and soforth, and those services absolutely were
used to smuggle photos and videos out of the country while things were being
filtered.

Behind all of the "make your twitter pic green, set your timezone to tehran!"
etc. etc. there was really amazingly good reporting happening via the
internet.

Did most of it happen via twitter? Probably not, but it certainly did help
things spread when they _did_ happen...granted, if you're just watching a
hashtag that _anybody_ can tag things with...then you're probably not getting
much legitimate news.

Use your mind when reading the news, this shouldn't be anything new.

------
mcknz
I don't think this type of analysis is simply trying to shatter Western social
media fantasies. It's important to know the true effect so the technology is
not misapplied in future events: "they don't need our help, they have
Twitter...."

------
yread
I always wonder how much of the 'news' is pure spin...

