Social Networking

In the wake of the hotly-contested presidential election in Iran, internet social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are emerging as the primary—if not only—means of disseminating information in a country in which the government has the power to censor the media, the internet, and other forms of information exchange. In fact, just as quickly as the Iranian government blocks or censors access to the internet, especially access to Facebook and Twitter, concerned Iranian citizens are finding ways to get around the restrictions by using overseas proxies—which, in turn, get blocked by the Iranian government.

The traffic on Twitter about the Iranian election has grown so large—and so important—that a critical network upgrade to the service was postponed, reports ReadWriteWeb. According to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, writing on the official Twitter blog:

“In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight (June 16). However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran . . . Our partners are taking a huge risk, not just for Twitter, but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation.”

The stream of tweets on Twitter’s #IranElection and #gr88—the purported “official” hash tags to follow the news coming from Iran—is flowing at such a torrential pace it’s difficult to keep up with what’s actually happening on the ground. One barely has time for a cursory glance at the existing tweets before hundreds of new tweets—literally—appear to compete for space.

Therein, of course, lies the rub: while tweets might make information available, the information made available is real-time, rough-draft, and out-of-context, making it tough for the outside observer to discern what’s really going on in Iran at the moment. Worse, re-tweets of unsubstantiated or unverified rumors have a habit of becoming facts over time, drastically distorting the real story.

Still, is the unsubstantiated word better than no word at all? According to Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor, as quoted by the New York Times, “As each new home for this (Twitter) material becomes a new target for censorship, a repressive system faces a game of whack-a-mole in blocking internet address after internet address carrying the subversive material.” Thus, for the Iranian government’s strategy of censorship to be successful, the battle becomes a street fight, of sorts, involving “troops” going house to house—or smart phone to smart phone—in order to stop the message from being spread. For them to stop any word at all from getting out is flat-out impossible.

What we’re experiencing, then, is diametrically opposed to what happened during the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Then, the Soviet Union was able to keep news of the disaster censored, leaving the rest of the world largely in the dark about what was going on, even though the plume of fallout spread as far as eastern North America. The internet, then, has seen to it that although governments can, and will, censor media outlets of all types, information wants to be free, and will find away to escape even the most draconian forms of censorship.

By Robert Pothier