Tweeting Towards Revolution: The Internet, Twitter, and Iran's election

By now, news of the disputed election and protests in Iran has spread to every major news outlet in the Western world. This sheer quantity of information coming out of Iran right now is impressive, especially given the measures the Iranian government has taken to block the spread of news within and beyond Iran.

Gatherings and protests have been banned, while a number of journalists have had their press credentials revoked, and have been barred from exiting their rooms. Cell phone networks have been shut down, while radio stations and satellite television stations have been jammed. Large swaths of the internet have been blocked in Iran, including email servers like gmail and Yahoo!. Officials have apparently also entered residences to seize satellite receivers visible from streets, and reports have surfaced of citizens’ computers being taken or destroyed.

Given the extreme measures taken to ebb the flow of news coming from Iran, the volume of information that continues to surface is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of many of the protesters and journalists within Iran. Twitter has been playing a particularly large roll in the global dissemination of election reporting, as thousands of individuals within Iran have released regular updates via twitter on the developing situation.

Thanks to the structure of Twitter, the service is particularly hard to block. While the government could easily stop Iranian access to twitter.com, there are dozens of ways to send and receive tweets without navigating to the official Twitter website. Thus, short of shutting down all internet access in Iran, there is virtually no way to effectively stop all Twitter communication. Yesterday, representatives of Twitter wrote that they “recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran,” and delayed a scheduled server update until a time when Iranian tweets would be less frequent. The US State Department has also noticed Twitters crucial role, according to CNN:

Senior officials say the State Department is working with Twitter and other social networking sites to ensure Iranians are able to continue to communicate to each other and the outside world.

However, it seems that Iranian officials are nonetheless targeting Twitter. Tweets emerged today warning users to be wary when reading messages from new Twitter users, as rumors have surfaced that official government entities are creating Twitter accounts with the intention of spreading misinformation to the world at large. The protesters are fighting back against the heavy internet censorship, using distributed denial of service attacks to cripple and shut down official Iranian and pro-Ahmadinejad websites.

Regardless of the outcome of the contested election, the events of the past several days will stand as an important testament to the role of social networking sites and new media in the facilitation of political movements and dissemination of news.