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Tuesday, June 16, 2009
News Iranian protestors use Twitter to spread word, organize
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 11:19 AM
The number one Twitter topic for the past 24 hours? The election and protests in Iran. In the mix you'll find students calling for help from their dorm rooms as plain-clothed police charge, online organizers asking anyone who can to set up proxies to keep the flow of information free and clear, rumors, pictures, videos and foreigners (in this case us, among others) trying to help but not knowing what to do.
The New York Times reports:
Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential election on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications.On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics.
Is the Iranian government watching the Twitterverse, looking for Iranian citizens to punish? It's possible. The rumors continue to swirl about which hashtags (symbols that lump like messages together) are compromised and which aren't.
A Twitter post from last night:
RT : Mobile network is down, sat TV, websites filtered/blocked. People inside Iran are losing their connection with the world. #Iran
Today, Reuters is reporting that the foreign media is now banned, making the ongoing Twitter coverage more valuable than ever.
Watching the tweets come through is disturbing and amazing at the same time. The chaos is overwhelming. The realization that we as Americans can protest anything we want without fear of death or political retribution remains priceless.
The call went out yesterday for Twitter users to turn their profile picture green and change their account's timestamps settings to make it appear that they were posting from Tehran, Iran, one of the cities experiencing massive protests.
Does it help? Who knows.
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