[A-List] America's Iranian Twitter Revolution

[Leighm]

So much blah blah... Just because every Iranian doesn't have internet 
access it's somehow counter-revolutionary blah blah.

Neither do many Americans... So, by extension, everyone on this list is 
somehow counter-revolutionary.

...or erhaps, we're just 'exceptional' (snicker)

Blah blah... stasis passing for political thought.

Yawn.



Tony B. wrote:
>
> America's Iranian Twitter Revolution
>
> http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/americas-iranian-twitter-revolution/ 
>
>
> America's Iranian Twitter Revolution
> 2009 June 17
> tags: ahmadinejad, CIA, Hezbollah, iran, iranelection, Iranian 
> elections, Israel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mossad, Tehran, tweet, 
> twitter, twitter revolt, twitter revolution
> by Maximilian Forte
>
> Which Revolution?
>
> If the headlines had spoken of a "Twitter revolution in Canada," a 
> North American society with very widespread broadband Internet access, 
> and almost complete Internet penetration, and one of the highest rates 
> of personal computer ownership, one would have still needed to be very 
> skeptical: 74% of Canadians surveyed have never even heard of Twitter, 
> and only 1.45% of Canadians actually use Twitter, most of those being 
> young, professionals, or in universities - as an active Canadian 
> Twitter user, I am part of a minuscule minority ("74% of Canadians 
> unaware of Twitter: online survey," CBC News, 11 June 2009). The only 
> Twitter revolution there could be in such a context then, is for 
> anyone beyond that minority to actually use it - let alone challenge 
> or transform an entire political system based on its use. That is not 
> just true of Canada either: according to a study done by the Harvard 
> Business School, only 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of 
> Twitter content ("10% of Twitter users generate over 90% of content, 
> study finds," CBC News, 5 June 2009). A real Twitter revolution would 
> be one that transcends the hype and Twitter self-promotion and sees 
> most users generating the content.
> While some, like Clay Shirky, will proclaim regarding this so-called 
> "Twitter revolution in Iran," that "this is it, this is the big one" 
> (thanks to Anthropology.net) the "it" and the "one" are what are most 
> in doubt. Yet it is doubt that is most absent from the analyses that 
> have been hastily proffered - and when skepticism is absent from 
> analysis, what are we left with? Hype, promotional propaganda, wishful 
> thinking - a rush to the headline-grabbing punchline. Shirky thinks 
> the whole world is watching, and he may be right, but he is wrong 
> about Twitter and other social media.
>
> This is indeed a "revolution".but it's for Twitter, this entity whose 
> very existence resembles the classic story of the start up from the 
> last dot com bust of the late 1990s, a "Bubble 2.0? firm operating in 
> a recession no less, without ever producing a business plan, and yet 
> getting $20 million here and $30 million there in financing (see this, 
> this, this, and that). Twitter may be as irrelevant to Iran as it is 
> good for the promotion of Twitter itself, and for the self-flattery of 
> some ardent Twitter users who believe that their tweets and their 
> green-tinted avatars will change the world, or at least Iran. The 
> revolution will not only be tweeted, it will be fast and easy, and it 
> will be led by Americans themselves, "for Iran".
>
> As part of my preparation for this article, I not only actively 
> followed and participated in three of the Iranian election streams on 
> Twitter, from 13 June (the day after Iran's elections) to this 
> morning, 17 June, I also collected a sample of 1,280 tweets, and 
> skimmed all of the tweets about the Iranian election starting from 13 
> June. Among the statements praising Twitter, and the ways of using 
> Twitter to "show support for the Iranian people", I have collected 
> these as representative examples:
>
> RT Huffington Post: "Iran's Revolution Will Be Twittered (and Blogged 
> and YouTubed and.)"
> The revolution will be tweeted
> WOW, Twitter is awesome!!!
> Yep Twitter Owns! #cnnfail #iranelection
> astounding what twitter has done with #iranelection
> thinks Twitter's role in the #IranElection could be historical
> thankyou twitter
> We're getting more news from social media than from traditional media. 
> Social intelligence progress!
> facinating [sic] how twitter brings real time accounts of events
> It is pretty easy being green. Turn Your Twitter Avatar Green To Show 
> Solidarity with People of Iran
> My Twitter photo has gone GREEN in support of the freedom revolution 
> of #IranElection
> None of the Twitter users who made those statements are among even the 
> allegedly Iranian Twitter users, and all except for one locate 
> themselves in the U.S., the other in Canada.
> Whose Revolution?
>
> Yet, some would have us believe that there is a "Twitter revolution" 
> going on in Iran, when there is no such thing. Not only that, what is 
> being boasted about the power of Twitter is almost entirely false. 
> What there is instead is a rush to the finish line, a predetermined 
> conclusion to immediately thank and praise Twitter in the context of 
> Iran's street protests.
>
> How representative are Iran's Twitter revolutionaries? In actual fact, 
> the only allegedly Iranian Twitter users who have been identified by 
> other Twitter users as tweeting about the Iranian protests, are fewer 
> than 45 (see one list here), most of whose locations cannot be 
> confirmed and almost all of whom post only in English. Yet, one can 
> get as many as 2,500 updates in a single minute, on one stream alone 
> (#iranelection), and most of that repetitive and uninformative 
> material is not being posted by anyone except for a huge mass of 
> American Twitter users. In total, only a third of Iranians even have 
> Internet access (we saw in the Canadian case that Internet access does 
> not translate into Twitter use) and, very interestingly, the youth who 
> are most associated with the protests and with Twitter use, consist of 
> 18-to-24-year-olds who in fact comprise "the strongest voting bloc for 
> Ahmadinejad of all age groups" (poll).
>
> The Associated Press has produced a similar analysis, noting that in 
> Iran, "Internet usage is mostly still a phenomenon of the affluent, 
> the youth and city-dwellers - meaning Twitter and other networks are 
> used mostly by the young and liberal - and may overemphasize their 
> numbers while ignoring more-conservative political sentiments among 
> the non-connected." Those interviewed by AP say that the Twitter hype 
> is creating an illusion that Tehran is witnessing another revolution, 
> or that Twitter even matters for Iranians. (See "Tweeting Iran: Elex 
> news in 140 characters or less," by Rebecca Santana, Associated Press, 
> 15 June 2009.)
> So in this Twitter revolution, Twitter is not representative of 
> Internet users, Internet use is not representative of a wider 
> population, the youth are not representative of the youth, and the 
> Iranians may not even be Iranian. Fantastic indeed, this power of 
> "social media".
>
> What Are the "Revolutionaries" Saying?
>
> "Where is my vote?" I am not sure where the votes of the disgruntled 
> losers of the Iranian election are, but I doubt that they are in 
> Twitter. Perhaps this view is mistaken, perhaps the way they recast 
> their ballot is through Twitter, and one would think that the pretty 
> young females with makeup and jewelry cast their real ballots when 
> they held up signs in Tehran, in English, for foreign news photographers.
>
> What is even less clear is whether they are saying anything much in 
> Twitter. Some journalists think they see a "new stage in the evolution 
> of social media," in the form of the "use of Twitter in Iran" (largely 
> mistaking Twitter for Iran with in Iran), and even claim that 
> "information is flooding out of the country - on Twitter" (see "Tweets 
> from Tehran: The use of Twitter in Iran is a new stage in the 
> evolution of social media," by Ashley Terry, Global NewsJune 15, 
> 2009). The question we should ask ourselves is: what information and 
> what is the nature of this "flood"?
>
> Personally, I have seen very little in the way of actual events being 
> reported, and when they are, they are retweeted (repeated) hundreds of 
> times over for almost an entire day. There is enormous volume, and 
> little content. Hanson Hosein, director of digital media at the 
> University of Washington, wrote "I'm having a hard time filtering 
> through #iranelection, beyond the re-tweets and second-hand 
> information passed around by Twitterers outside the country..We can't 
> take [tweets] at face value. It can be quite dangerous. We should be 
> doing as much fact-checking as possible" (source). Michael Crowley 
> also wrote, "One thing that really bothers me about these twitters and 
> first-hand accounts posted on blogs is that there's no way to verify 
> them; I've seen several that either seemed suspect or turned out to be 
> false" (source). Similarly, another blogger observed that, "If you, as 
> an average news consumer, relied on Twitter you might believe all 
> sorts of things had happened, which simply hadn't, running a high risk 
> of being seriously misled about events on the ground. You might at 
> best, have simply been confused. You probably wouldn't have thought 
> Ahmadinejad enjoys much popular support at all" (source).
>
> One of the most common retweets I read, over a two-day period, was 
> this one, sometimes with minor modifications:
> "RT From Iran: CONFIRMED!! Army moving into Tehran against protesters! 
> PLZ RT! URGENT!"
> In fact, there was no army "move against" the protesters, not at the 
> time, not before it, not even right after it. Some of the tweets 
> seemed designed to deliberately spread misinformation, such as:
> military is rumoured to refusing orders to shoot
> and
> 2 million in the streets
> and
> @VOA claims 5000 Lebanese Hezbollah Milita h/b brought down to Iran to 
> help control the situation #iranelection [that particular Twitter 
> account, remains entirely blank in actual fact]
>
> and
> students being thrown from university building by police
> and
> IRAN: CONFIRMING 10~15 dead at dorms last night! Floors are covered w/ 
> blood!!! (http://twitter.com/sissyto4 location: USA)
> and
> I have heard here that there may be a national strike in Iran on 
> Tuesday. (said a New York twitter user)
> Not only does Twitter allow Americans to engage in participant 
> voyeurism, it allows them to create the "news" about Iran for Iranians 
> themselves, and apparently making it up as they go along. Indeed, 
> anyone can be an Iranian in Twitter, and in fact all are being 
> encouraged to "become" Iranian as in this other vastly over-repeated 
> tweet:
> RT help protect Iranian tweeters by changing your timezone to GMT+3:30 
> and location to Tehran
> In addition, having urged all to do as above, there is a further 
> effort to mask the identity of alleged Iranian Twitter users:
> When re-tweeting sources from Iran please delete handler name. Type RT 
> SOURCE from Iran #iranelection #gr88 VERY IMPORTANT!!!! Pls RT
> The problem as we see is that when everybody is in Iran, nobody is in 
> Iran.
>
> Social Media Are Better Than.?
>
> The last point raises the issue of how are we to value the 
> "information" provided by this "Twitter revolt". The first problem is 
> to get over short attention spans - this is not the first "Twitter 
> revolt" as some in Twitter suggest. The latest, previous revolt was in 
> Moldova, and I personally followed very closely the Greek riots 
> through Twitter and many other media. Indeed, the #griots stream is 
> still active, and when it was especially active in December of 2008, 
> it featured countless links to independent media, loaded with 
> photographs and videos, and many if not most of the tweets were in 
> Greek - it was a Greek event, generated for Greeks and to be consumed 
> by Greeks. Thus previously I have not had the reason for criticizing 
> Twitter as I do now.
>
> There is virtually no accountability or transparency evident in this 
> now almost mythical "Iranian Twitter Revolution," as we do not know 
> who is where and why they are saying what they do. It is not as easy 
> to get away with truth-creation in the mainstream media, especially 
> when reporting from conflict zones: as has happened many times in the 
> past, untruthful reporters claiming to be filing stories from the war 
> zone have been unmasked by others as being nowhere in sight, or, if 
> there, as never leaving their hotels. We cannot do that with Twitter. 
> One Twitter user pleaded, "don't retweet anything until it's 
> confirmed, spreading rumors will do more harm than good #iranelection" 
> - but then, how is it confirmed? Propaganda journalism often gets 
> unmasked; in Twitter, propaganda gets retweeted and thus remasked.
>
> Not only is Twitter "reporting" not more credible than the mainstream 
> media, it is also vastly less informative. On a simple quantitative 
> scale: add up everything that is actually reported as "news" in 
> #iranelection, whether true or not, confirmed or not, and compare it 
> side by side with any one article from the major wire services. I 
> would venture that half of any one article for the day contains more 
> information than all of the day's tweets combined. As if to confirm 
> the relationship, many of the tweets themselves link to mainstream 
> media sources.
>
> As for "social media" providing egalitarian access and voice for 
> everyone, what is most immediately apparent from #iranelection in 
> Twitter is the drive to silence some voices: "all users IGNORE all 
> post except from reliable sources," said one. How do you know a source 
> is "reliable" in Twitter? "I'm really following this closely. 
> Fascinating watching the protests unfold" - but you are not actually 
> watching the protests. You are entertaining an illusion in your mind 
> that is generated by the tweets.
> A Revolution in the American Fantasy
>
> It may be wrong to single out Americans here, since there is every 
> likelihood, given the current geopolitical context, that Israeli 
> Twitter users (among the heaviest Twitter users one can find) have a 
> vested interest in manipulating the discussion to serve the ends of 
> the Israeli state, as do many Americans. One thing to do is to try to 
> foment a division between Iran and Hezbollah, thus one posted: "large 
> number of armed forces are lebanese/arab hired to beat down the brave 
> iranians" - completely without substance. Another Twitter user I spoke 
> to chose to quote the Talmud to the Iranian protesters. Interestingly, 
> the Jerusalem Post was immediately "aware" of three "Iranian" bloggers 
> (who post only in English), almost as soon as they joined, claiming 
> without support that their Twitter feeds were from Iran (see here and 
> here).
> That the U.S. government has an active interest in the unfolding of 
> the "Twitter revolution" for Iran, is an established fact. The U.S. 
> State Department intervened to ask Twitter to delay a scheduled 
> maintenance break so as to not interrupt tweets about Iran - "Ian 
> Kelly, a state department spokesman, told reporters at a briefing that 
> he had recognized over the weekend the importance of social media 'as 
> a vital tool for citizens' empowerment and as a way for people to get 
> their messages out'. He said: 'It was very clear to me that these 
> kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy - 
> spreading the word about what was going on'" (see "US urges Twitter to 
> delay service break," by Chris Nuttall and DanielDombey,Financial 
> Times, 17 June 2009, and "U.S. State Department speaks to Twitter over 
> Iran," Reuters, 16 June 2009). What the U.S. State Department is also 
> doing, of course, is reinforcing the unproven claim that this is 
> important to Iran, while careful not to specify whose citizens are 
> being empowered, whose word is being spread, and "out" from where. At 
> the same time, the Obama regime claims that it is not meddling in 
> Iranian affaris.
>
> As if to close the feedback loop, some Twitter users directed messages 
> at Obama's own Twitter account, urging him to wear a green tie "in 
> solidarity with the Iranian people". It is interesting solidarity, 
> given that no one has been able to show that Ahmadinejad actually lost 
> the election, given that the entire premise for the protest is that if 
> he won, then it must be a fraud. Not exactly top-notch analysis. (See 
> instead, "Ahmadinejad won. Get over it," by Lynt Leverett and Hillary 
> Mann Leverett, Politico, 15 June 2009.)
>
> To further close the loop between "independent" Twitter users and the 
> American state and its foreign policy aims, instructions have been 
> provided on how to conduct "cyberwar" against Iranian websites 
> (source). Others try to forge an ideological link between the Iranian 
> protesters and Twitter's American Republicans: some American Twitter 
> conservatives inserted their #tcot tag when addressing #iranelection. 
> Others proclaim the following:
>
> The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood 
> of patriots and tyrants.-Thomas Jefferson #iranelection
> Yes we care about people outside America. It's just sometimes hard to 
> show when the leaders of other countries keep us apart.
> Yet none of these people cared about democracy when another of Egypt's 
> fraudulent elections took place, seeing the arrest and torture and 
> sometimes the murder of opposition activists. In that case, a dictator 
> favourable to American and Israeli interests is being propped up, and 
> "we" dutifully remain indifferent. The same indifference is likely to 
> be shown for the upcoming Afghan elections, when perhaps once again 
> multiple voting will occur.
>
> Glenn Greenwald put the situation best, and with far more discernment 
> and perspicacity than any cheerleading Shirky, when he writes in "The 
> 'Bomb Iran' contingent's newfound concern for The Iranian People" 
> (Salon, 16 June 2009:
>
> "Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of 
> The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a 
> military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on 
> their country - actions which would result in the slaughter of many of 
> those very same Iranian People.  During the presidential campaign, 
> John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran.  The Wall 
> St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz 
> entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz 
> said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs 
> the Iranians."  John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same 
> bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol - with typical prescience - 
> hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected.  
> Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear 
> attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program."
>
>
>