“Twitter has been the lifeline for the people of Iran as a way to post breaking news, pictures and video. Iranians are using Twitter like never before. Twitterers are using functionally proxy addresses that let users bypass the government’s censors in the midst of chaos and strict government enforcement, Twitterers have found a clever way to make the Internet accessible.”
After elections in Iran Friday put incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power swarms of Iranians have taken to the streets in protest. But now a digital war is brewing between online users and the government of Iran.
News outlets around the world are commenting on twitters role in particular…
ZDNet headlines, “Iranian protestors take to the tweets”
Agence France Presse goes with “Twitter streams break Iran news dam”
And The Seattle Times “…Iran election news just a tweet away from Tehran”
The Daily Beast brings us an optimistic outlook on how activists are utilizing the Internet to get their message out.
“Tehran’s streets may be bloody, but the opposition has won the digital war. The battleground: Facebook and Twitter. The weapons: bandwidth and hacking. The prize: the end of totalitarianism.”
The New York Times takes a matter-of-fact attitude…
“[The activists] activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential election on Friday.”
Forbes backs that up and says Twitter even decided to delay scheduled maintenance to allow Iranian’s online protests to continue.
“If it hadn’t been for a network upgrade that required Twitter to schedule 90 minutes of downtime at 9:45 Pacific Standard Time, Twitter might have continued to play the role of an impartial platform, with no apparent distinction between the plight of Iranian activists and the network capacity needs of over-sharing American celebrities.”
Ahmadinejad’s political rival Mir-Hossein Mousavi is using Facebook, Flickr and Twitter to update his dissenting supporters.
A Mousavi tweet:
“We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread the message. One Person=One Broadcaster.”
However, CNN's senior Arab affairs editor has some advice: how to filter twitter updates for the real story.
“You shouldn't get on the site now and start to believe everything you read or everything you hear... So what we do, we basically try to match information. Someone tweets something, I'll send it out, someone else's hearing this and then we report it, we tell our audience what we're hearing. We'd say this is from inside Iran, this is going through censorship, this is what our reporters on the ground are saying, and reporting back to us.”
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