Twitter Plays Critical Role in Iran Election Coverage
Twitter, the social-networking service derided for being the last refuge of the banal, has gained a new currency on the world stage. The stream of micro-blog postings has proven an important source of real-time news and images of the violence that erupted following the contested presidential election in Iran.
Iranian protesters turned to Twitter — and other social-networking sites, including Facebook — after Iranian censors ordered foreign journalists to stop live reporting of the protests. Now, according the Middle Eastern news outlet Al Jazeera, the government of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to filter Twitter and Facebook traffic to stop the reports.
Delayed Maintenance
In the United States, the tweets from the streets of Iran caught the attention of the State Department. With old media shut down and no formal diplomatic presence, the department was just as reliant on the Twitterverse as everyone else — so much so, in fact, that a “low-level State Department official” contacted Twitter and asked it to delay a long-scheduled maintenance shutdown. State Department officials stressed that it was not Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who made the call.
As Twitter cofounder Biz Stone later tweeted, “NTT America proves again why they are such an awesome partner and reschedules urgent network maintenance.”
As he explained in a linked blog post, “A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Today’s decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter.”
Routing Around Censorship
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Gilmore once famously said that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” The tweeting in Iran…
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