4 ms·

The Revolution Will Be Twittered

42 points by jcsalterego 17y ago

frisco 17y ago
It's 5:30am on the East Coast and I've just been up all night, watching with rapt attention Twitter feeds since 11pm. The media's been inexplicably out of it (see #CNNfail, but CNN isn't the only one), but Twitter's been amazing to watch. There's been a revolution -- who knows if it'll go anywhere, much less be successful -- organizing in front of me. Users in Tehran debating whether meetups are traps (the 12:30pm "Mousavi gathering" ended up being surrounded by special police, with Mousavi nowhere in sight), and coordinating news and rallies. Local students have been sharing paths around tear gas in and out of dorms; what doors to avoid due to waiting unmarked vans on the other side. How to avoid secret police going door-to-door collecting satellite dishes and modems; cell phone service status throughout the city. It's amazing. Edit: There's one picture that sums it up: http://twitpic.com/7c85l http://twitpic.com/7c85l At least she's facing people, not tanks. Hopefully she's still around...
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  Great picture. Thanks for the link. Twitter gives a sense of immediacy and importance to, well, rather mundane things. I wonder if it might be magnifying the effect here. After all, even a few thousand temporarily upset people many times don't amount to much than a few protests. I don't know one way or the other -- just speculating that Twitter may actually out-do cable news in hyping news stories. Whatever happens, it will be interesting to watch the mix of technology and society.
  - diN0bot 17y ago
    it is real "reality tv". i think that keeps it a tad more honest and a ton more interesting.
- TomOfTTB 17y ago
  What exactly are you watching on Twitter? Other than "There are riots in the Tehran over the election" what more is there to say right now? Anyone who is watching the situation knows the communication lines have been cut. As for CNN they did report on it during their news casts. What else would you have them do? They have no footage (cameras are being confiscated), no direct communication with reporters and therefore no accurate information. So there's nothing really to report (other than people on Twitter who are either making things up or regurgitating news reports that repeat the same known facts over and over again) Do you really want a media that reports on something even though they have no facts?
  - frisco 17y ago
    Last night it was #IranElection, the keyword "Mousavi", @Change_for_Iran, among several others. Yes, there are rumors going around, but if you found the right users there were definitely people right there, standing on the streets. That strikes me as more credible than reporters which aren't necessarily getting the whole story, especially if foreign press is being asked to leave the country. "Mackell says the crackdown on protests has also extended to journalists, making it almost impossible for the media to cover the story. "I saw yesterday a Japanese camera crew who have full government permission and were working with an approved government translator, still were beaten and arrested by the police for filming at a protest. That kind of thing is happening to a lot of people. Journalists are having their cameras taken." (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/14/world/main5087285.shtml http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/14/world/main5087285....) That's where Twitter -- as long as you're looking at people who are actually there -- comes in.
    - tlrobinson 17y ago
      If you have a list of quality Twitter users you should add them here: http://almost.at/#iran http://almost.at/#iran (click the person icon with a "+")
rms 17y ago
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/laura-secor-irans-stolen-election.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/laura... http://garysick.tumblr.com/post/123070238/irans-political-coup http://garysick.tumblr.com/post/123070238/irans-political-co... http://hashtags.org/tag/iranelection/messages http://hashtags.org/tag/iranelection/messages Please don't turn this into a meta discussion about whether or not this is hacker news.
- swombat 17y ago
  Surely anything that involves the effect of a new technology (Twitter) on major world events is Hacker News. I don't see how anyone could argue against it.
swombat 17y ago
How will Twitter self-organisation fare if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard decides to start shooting? It's great that the Iranian people can self-organise despite all the attempted censorship of the government, and certainly the free flow of information is a powerful tool in the hands of the people... but guns are powerful tools too. It's also curious why they did not clamp down on Twitter. After all, the Chinese government had no trouble shutting down Twitter along with all the other tools of communication. Here's another thought: if things like Twitter are such a powerful agent of change, perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter. With all that said, I wish the best of luck to the Iranian people, and I hope they prevail. This is a historic moment, and I hope their victory without bloodshed.
- jazzyb 17y ago
  "...perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter." Check out tor (http://www.torproject.org/ http://www.torproject.org/). It's slow, but it's the closest thing we have to that right now.
  - dagobart 17y ago
    Despite this contributes nothing to the Iran thread, I find it amazing that you say 'we'. I neither want to go off-topic here. But it occured to me that people closely attached to the web tend to realize a 'we' amongst them, across all borders.
- tphyahoo 17y ago
  That's an interesting idea. What if the bad-guy governments use these proxies themselves to spam/dos and generally behave badly. Proxies get blacklisted. Government can get back to rounding people up. I guess at some point, if you're going to try to overthrow the government, you have to reach out to your neighbor and take to the streets, regardless to what technology you have available.
spazmaster 17y ago
i'm just a tad confused. if all internet and mobile lines are cut, how can they use twitter?
- randallsquared 17y ago
  I guess satellite internet? Or maybe the mobile only cut the voice and it didn't occur to them that significant use could be made of SMS?
  - nir 17y ago
    IIRC cutting off SMS was one of the first things the government did. SMS was even disabled a day before the elections with the formal explanation of preventing last minute campaigning. The article seems a bit hyper. "As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived." - does Sullivan think Twitter has some uniquely resilient technology? Twitter will survive right until whoever's in charge takes the 10 seconds to put twitter.com into Iran's blocked sites list (or, you know, the next the fail whale)
  - TomOfTTB 17y ago
    The only way I could see is through SMS using a low power satellite phone such as this: http://www.iridium.com/products/product.php?linx=0350 http://www.iridium.com/products/product.php?linx=0350 But in a country where people live on roughly $2 a day (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terrorism25 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terr...) I doubt many have $1,400 satellite phones that cost $6 a day to use. Other methods are impossible... Twitter is blocked through regular internet (see Michael C. McHugh comment here: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/The_stakes_in_Iran.html http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/The_stakes_in_Ir... ) Cell phone towers are what's been cut so no SMS (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-SfeEO9WhpOVG6Slnu0w http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-...) Satellite dishes have been banned since '94 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34407 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34407) so no highspeed internet that way.
    - 17y ago
tezza 17y ago
Twitter will only be any good for this flash mob style communication. To that end it seems to have replaced pirate radio / ham radio. :: Back then the problems were the same: Listeners had to be listening on the same channel, they had to have listening equipment, and they needed to act on the information. People broadcasting had the problem of being traced and executed Strategy, tactics cannot be discussed via an open channel. --- Relating to the blog post, it details a quite lame call-to-action. This had little risk for the participant [tweeter or complier]. It was the tweet equivalent of "Honk if you hate Ahmedinejad":: Honking ensues --- How long will activists be tweeting when @IranianGuard busts down @IranFreeNow ' s door and sprays her with bullets? @IranFreeNow: Loud knock @ door, maybe my comrades? [last message]
- tezza 17y ago
  Twitter is different to Radio. In a worse way :: A radio transmission is a single-point-in-time event. So once you have broadcast, you leave no trace. Twitter leaves a trail, which can be monitored post-facto by the enemy. Presumably they could sit and wait and list who reads each tweet too. Twitter readers aren't going to be happy with this.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  How long will activists be tweeting when @IranianGuard busts down @IranFreeNow ' s door and sprays her with bullets? It's when large numbers of people are willing to defy that risk that things change.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
joel_feather 17y ago
The united states has a huge vested interest in this reelection failing. I prefer to withhold my opinion till I hear from BOTH sides of the conflict, and not just from the side that aligns with western interests.
- jerf 17y ago
  I'd have to say that at this scale, talking about the "United States" as some sort of monolithic entity will lead to weak thinking. Some parts think the mullahs should be lined up and shot, some are pretty comfortable with their control, and there's everything in between, including a lot of opinions that don't show up on this axis. Some are pretty tied into a line about Iran being no threat, some are pretty tied into Iran (and what it represents) being a mortal threat to all civilization.
KC8ZKF 17y ago
We might be overstating Twitter's role in this situation. Because we are receiving so many good reports via Twitter, those of us who aren't in Iran might be committing a type of spotlight fallacy by believing that Twitter is having a large effect on the events themselves.
- dagobart 17y ago
  A while back Vancouver Film School (VFS) released a short-film on how Iran embraces new media, namely the web. The piece is titled "Iran: A Nation of Bloggers", can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MChlT0GvFPM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MChlT0GvFPM . With about 100000 (one hundred thousand) actively maintained blogs, I can imagine Twitter indeed does play an important role there.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Lol_Lolovici 17y ago
It's interesting that something that already happened at least once is suddenly much more interesting because it involves the Islamic world. This was done before in Moldavia (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/inside-moldovas/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/inside-moldovas/) but it was not that interesting for the media then because it wasn't Muslims and nobody wanted to anger Russia at that moment.
- idlewords 17y ago
  Moldova, not Moldavia. You've actually got it backwards - the Twitter angle was hyped pretty hard by the media during the Moldovan protests, even though only a small handful of protesters used the service. These kind of bromides about [information technology of the day] enabling a new kind of revolution are as old as the hills - I remember hearing similar stuff about fax machines/email during the Bosnian war - and typically have little to do with the actual messy reality, and a lot to do with wishful thinking. In the case of Moldova, press coverage died down fast because a) the election was contested in court and demonstrations stopped and b) some of the original demonstrations appear to have been a provocation by the government, which wanted an excuse to crack down. The situation got murky real fast, and with no more easy angle on the story, the Western press lost interest.
  - Lol_Lolovici 17y ago
    I don't understand what I got backwards. I was just pointing out that this is a very similar situation to that one (revolution, twitter, elections) and it has the same media buzz but with the added bonus that it involves a Muslim country hence the US media enjoys it more. Your points about that situation are valid of course but that was not what I was saying. It's funny you should correct the way I wrote the country name. I know the proper name but I chose to write it like most English users would know it.
far33d 17y ago
Use of proxies is quite common in Iran, and working proxy lists are being passed around on twitter.

42 points by jcsalterego 17y ago

It's 5:30am on the East Coast and I've just been up all night, watching with rapt attention Twitter feeds since 11pm. The media's been inexplicably out of it (see #CNNfail, but CNN isn't the only one), but Twitter's been amazing to watch. There's been a revolution -- who knows if it'll go anywhere, much less be successful -- organizing in front of me. Users in Tehran debating whether meetups are traps (the 12:30pm "Mousavi gathering" ended up being surrounded by special police, with Mousavi nowhere in sight), and coordinating news and rallies. Local students have been sharing paths around tear gas in and out of dorms; what doors to avoid due to waiting unmarked vans on the other side. How to avoid secret police going door-to-door collecting satellite dishes and modems; cell phone service status throughout the city. It's amazing. Edit: There's one picture that sums it up: http://twitpic.com/7c85l http://twitpic.com/7c85l At least she's facing people, not tanks. Hopefully she's still around...

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
Great picture. Thanks for the link. Twitter gives a sense of immediacy and importance to, well, rather mundane things. I wonder if it might be magnifying the effect here. After all, even a few thousand temporarily upset people many times don't amount to much than a few protests. I don't know one way or the other -- just speculating that Twitter may actually out-do cable news in hyping news stories. Whatever happens, it will be interesting to watch the mix of technology and society.
- diN0bot 17y ago
  it is real "reality tv". i think that keeps it a tad more honest and a ton more interesting.
TomOfTTB 17y ago
What exactly are you watching on Twitter? Other than "There are riots in the Tehran over the election" what more is there to say right now? Anyone who is watching the situation knows the communication lines have been cut. As for CNN they did report on it during their news casts. What else would you have them do? They have no footage (cameras are being confiscated), no direct communication with reporters and therefore no accurate information. So there's nothing really to report (other than people on Twitter who are either making things up or regurgitating news reports that repeat the same known facts over and over again) Do you really want a media that reports on something even though they have no facts?
- frisco 17y ago
  Last night it was #IranElection, the keyword "Mousavi", @Change_for_Iran, among several others. Yes, there are rumors going around, but if you found the right users there were definitely people right there, standing on the streets. That strikes me as more credible than reporters which aren't necessarily getting the whole story, especially if foreign press is being asked to leave the country. "Mackell says the crackdown on protests has also extended to journalists, making it almost impossible for the media to cover the story. "I saw yesterday a Japanese camera crew who have full government permission and were working with an approved government translator, still were beaten and arrested by the police for filming at a protest. That kind of thing is happening to a lot of people. Journalists are having their cameras taken." (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/14/world/main5087285.shtml http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/14/world/main5087285....) That's where Twitter -- as long as you're looking at people who are actually there -- comes in.
  - tlrobinson 17y ago
    If you have a list of quality Twitter users you should add them here: http://almost.at/#iran http://almost.at/#iran (click the person icon with a "+")

rms 17y ago

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/laura-secor-irans-stolen-election.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/laura... http://garysick.tumblr.com/post/123070238/irans-political-coup http://garysick.tumblr.com/post/123070238/irans-political-co... http://hashtags.org/tag/iranelection/messages http://hashtags.org/tag/iranelection/messages Please don't turn this into a meta discussion about whether or not this is hacker news.

swombat 17y ago
Surely anything that involves the effect of a new technology (Twitter) on major world events is Hacker News. I don't see how anyone could argue against it.

swombat 17y ago

How will Twitter self-organisation fare if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard decides to start shooting? It's great that the Iranian people can self-organise despite all the attempted censorship of the government, and certainly the free flow of information is a powerful tool in the hands of the people... but guns are powerful tools too. It's also curious why they did not clamp down on Twitter. After all, the Chinese government had no trouble shutting down Twitter along with all the other tools of communication. Here's another thought: if things like Twitter are such a powerful agent of change, perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter. With all that said, I wish the best of luck to the Iranian people, and I hope they prevail. This is a historic moment, and I hope their victory without bloodshed.

jazzyb 17y ago
"...perhaps there should be a non-profit that exists for the sole purpose of providing rapidly changing and shifting anonymising proxies to people everywhere, to make it so that it is effectively impossible for any government in the world to block something like Twitter." Check out tor (http://www.torproject.org/ http://www.torproject.org/). It's slow, but it's the closest thing we have to that right now.
- dagobart 17y ago
  Despite this contributes nothing to the Iran thread, I find it amazing that you say 'we'. I neither want to go off-topic here. But it occured to me that people closely attached to the web tend to realize a 'we' amongst them, across all borders.
tphyahoo 17y ago
That's an interesting idea. What if the bad-guy governments use these proxies themselves to spam/dos and generally behave badly. Proxies get blacklisted. Government can get back to rounding people up. I guess at some point, if you're going to try to overthrow the government, you have to reach out to your neighbor and take to the streets, regardless to what technology you have available.

spazmaster 17y ago

i'm just a tad confused. if all internet and mobile lines are cut, how can they use twitter?

randallsquared 17y ago
I guess satellite internet? Or maybe the mobile only cut the voice and it didn't occur to them that significant use could be made of SMS?
- nir 17y ago
  IIRC cutting off SMS was one of the first things the government did. SMS was even disabled a day before the elections with the formal explanation of preventing last minute campaigning. The article seems a bit hyper. "As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived." - does Sullivan think Twitter has some uniquely resilient technology? Twitter will survive right until whoever's in charge takes the 10 seconds to put twitter.com into Iran's blocked sites list (or, you know, the next the fail whale)
- TomOfTTB 17y ago
  The only way I could see is through SMS using a low power satellite phone such as this: http://www.iridium.com/products/product.php?linx=0350 http://www.iridium.com/products/product.php?linx=0350 But in a country where people live on roughly $2 a day (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terrorism25 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/25/afghanistan.terr...) I doubt many have $1,400 satellite phones that cost $6 a day to use. Other methods are impossible... Twitter is blocked through regular internet (see Michael C. McHugh comment here: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/The_stakes_in_Iran.html http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0609/The_stakes_in_Ir... ) Cell phone towers are what's been cut so no SMS (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-SfeEO9WhpOVG6Slnu0w http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSPlmVgh-...) Satellite dishes have been banned since '94 (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34407 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34407) so no highspeed internet that way.
  - 17y ago

tezza 17y ago

Twitter will only be any good for this flash mob style communication. To that end it seems to have replaced pirate radio / ham radio. :: Back then the problems were the same: Listeners had to be listening on the same channel, they had to have listening equipment, and they needed to act on the information. People broadcasting had the problem of being traced and executed Strategy, tactics cannot be discussed via an open channel. --- Relating to the blog post, it details a quite lame call-to-action. This had little risk for the participant [tweeter or complier]. It was the tweet equivalent of "Honk if you hate Ahmedinejad":: Honking ensues --- How long will activists be tweeting when @IranianGuard busts down @IranFreeNow ' s door and sprays her with bullets? @IranFreeNow: Loud knock @ door, maybe my comrades? [last message]

tezza 17y ago
Twitter is different to Radio. In a worse way :: A radio transmission is a single-point-in-time event. So once you have broadcast, you leave no trace. Twitter leaves a trail, which can be monitored post-facto by the enemy. Presumably they could sit and wait and list who reads each tweet too. Twitter readers aren't going to be happy with this.
randallsquared 17y ago
How long will activists be tweeting when @IranianGuard busts down @IranFreeNow ' s door and sprays her with bullets? It's when large numbers of people are willing to defy that risk that things change.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

joel_feather 17y ago

The united states has a huge vested interest in this reelection failing. I prefer to withhold my opinion till I hear from BOTH sides of the conflict, and not just from the side that aligns with western interests.

jerf 17y ago
I'd have to say that at this scale, talking about the "United States" as some sort of monolithic entity will lead to weak thinking. Some parts think the mullahs should be lined up and shot, some are pretty comfortable with their control, and there's everything in between, including a lot of opinions that don't show up on this axis. Some are pretty tied into a line about Iran being no threat, some are pretty tied into Iran (and what it represents) being a mortal threat to all civilization.

KC8ZKF 17y ago

We might be overstating Twitter's role in this situation. Because we are receiving so many good reports via Twitter, those of us who aren't in Iran might be committing a type of spotlight fallacy by believing that Twitter is having a large effect on the events themselves.

dagobart 17y ago
A while back Vancouver Film School (VFS) released a short-film on how Iran embraces new media, namely the web. The piece is titled "Iran: A Nation of Bloggers", can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MChlT0GvFPM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MChlT0GvFPM . With about 100000 (one hundred thousand) actively maintained blogs, I can imagine Twitter indeed does play an important role there.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

Lol_Lolovici 17y ago

It's interesting that something that already happened at least once is suddenly much more interesting because it involves the Islamic world. This was done before in Moldavia (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/inside-moldovas/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/inside-moldovas/) but it was not that interesting for the media then because it wasn't Muslims and nobody wanted to anger Russia at that moment.

idlewords 17y ago
Moldova, not Moldavia. You've actually got it backwards - the Twitter angle was hyped pretty hard by the media during the Moldovan protests, even though only a small handful of protesters used the service. These kind of bromides about [information technology of the day] enabling a new kind of revolution are as old as the hills - I remember hearing similar stuff about fax machines/email during the Bosnian war - and typically have little to do with the actual messy reality, and a lot to do with wishful thinking. In the case of Moldova, press coverage died down fast because a) the election was contested in court and demonstrations stopped and b) some of the original demonstrations appear to have been a provocation by the government, which wanted an excuse to crack down. The situation got murky real fast, and with no more easy angle on the story, the Western press lost interest.
- Lol_Lolovici 17y ago
  I don't understand what I got backwards. I was just pointing out that this is a very similar situation to that one (revolution, twitter, elections) and it has the same media buzz but with the added bonus that it involves a Muslim country hence the US media enjoys it more. Your points about that situation are valid of course but that was not what I was saying. It's funny you should correct the way I wrote the country name. I know the proper name but I chose to write it like most English users would know it.

far33d 17y ago

Use of proxies is quite common in Iran, and working proxy lists are being passed around on twitter.