Wed, 17/06/2009 - 16:24
Twitter is a powerful tool for reporting events as they happen. Events surrounding the Iranian election may have gone unreported to the outside world were it not for Twitter. Activists can, and should, use the web service to get the word out. But there are risks.
Twitter is a website where you can post a 140 character message to anyone who wants to listen to you. These people are called your 'followers'. In turn, you can 'follow' other people. Twitter can either be used for one-to-many broadcasts, or many-to-many conversations. It can be updated via the web, or using a mobile phone.
You can Twitter from your mobile phone, so you can Twitter from anywhere - whether you're hiding behind a dustbin witnessing police brutality, or you've just scaled a cooling tower to drop a 'no more coal' banner. Anyone with a mobile phone or web access can read your messages.
It can be used for more than just publicity too. Friends of an activist received an urgent Twitter message: "I've just been arrested". Later followed by a message telling to which police station. This was ebough for their friends to track them down and make sure they weren't being mistreated.
Twitter is essentially a democratic communication tool. Newspapers, television and radio are all broadcast tools. A small group of people make the media, and the rest have to put up with being 'the audience'. The audience are allowed little, if any, say over what is broadcast. Twitter, along with many other web services, is a conversational tool. Everyone is given the ability to say what they want. Twitter is owned by a private company, but the media content is broadly controlled by the people using it.
Unlike television and radio, you actually get to participate in creating the media. Twitter is the sum of its twitterers, so the messages are much more varied and interesting than what you'll find on the 10 O'Clock News. Unlike traditional media, there is no strict hierarchy to control what is said, and I've yet to seen any evidence of censorship.
140 character messages are quick to write and the technology itself is very fast. Within twenty minutes, hundreds of messages could go back and forth between an activist taking part in a demonstration, and supporters around the world. This gives a real, human, sense of connection to the events as they're unfolding that television, or even blogging, struggles to match.
As I write this factsheet, Twitter is revealing itself to be the primary news source for the unrest in Iran. Supporters of the moderate Mousavi have taken to the streets in protest against the election result. They think that the victory by incumbent President Ahmadinejad was a fix, and that officials lied about the vote count. In the days after the election, the Government shut down Iranian newspapers, restricted access to social media websites, and used electronic jamming to prevent Iranians watching BBC Persia. Foreign journalists were arrested and thrown out of the country. It has become very hard both for Iranians, and the rest of the world, to find out what is happening in Iran.
But Iranian activists found ways around the government block on Twitter, and continued to use it to get word out of what was happening on the ground. When traditional media was scratching its corporate head, breaking news live from the Tehran riots was spreading across Twitter. CNN, which claims to be a major news source, had no mention at all of the events. If it wasn't for social media, the outside world would probably know nothing of the clashes between police and protestors.
There was a lot of frustration by twitterers about this 'CNN Fail', which resulted in CNN showing a feed of Twitter messages on their news show!
Operatives of the Iran Government were rumoured to be searching for users with their location set as Tehran, and by other details. Posting information on Twitter puts them in real bodily danger, so it is very important that their messages are kept anonymous. On the other hand, government operatives are also thought to be spreading misinformation on Twitter, so validating facts is also really important. How to solve this problem is going to be of great importance as Twitter grows in popularity as a news source and activist tool.