Iranian election uprising: Twitter tracks it real-time, Iranian bloggers evade 'Net Censorship

Wagner James Au says,

Iranians around the world are making extraordinary use of Twitter and Twitter APIs to send updates and coordinate the uprising that now disputes Ahmadinejad's election. (Some background from Andrew Sullivan here) Last night Tweets from Iran seemed to go silent for several hours, apparently after Iranian government intervention, but protesters just used TwitterFall.com and other workarounds to keep the information stream going. (As one developer supporter put it, "Open APIs equal freedom.") The mainstream media has been tragically slow to cover what seems to be a major social upheaval fueled by Twitter.

BB reader Luke adds,

Persiankiwi on twitter is tweeting like a crazyman about the protests happening RIGHT NOW in Tehran and has just posted this video on Youtube. Also this twitter user is posting. They reckon the protests are largely peaceful and also guess at least hundreds of thousands are on the streets.

Link to Twitter search for hashtag "IranElection." Some Twitterers I'm following on this issue: @persiankiwi, @ johnperrybarlow , IranRiggedElect, @Pouyan. Here was a liveblog post over at HuffPo by Nico Putney. Here's a piece by Nasrin Alawi. Please add other resources you're following in the comments.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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The Snowden Principle

IWood

Route around the damage.
pentomino

#21: Why Squid and not Tor?
Anonymous

One of the glaring problems with the Twitter/Flickr as news source is one of credibility. What’s to stop me from setting up a Twitter account with ‘Iran’ in the username and start posting as if I were there? Same with Flickr; find some random images of riots and start posting.

My fear is less that amateurs will start being accepted as journalists, but that professional propagandists will use these tools to disseminate carefully crafted messages that are disguised as man-on-the-scene tweets and cell-phone imagery.

I know people want to believe that Twitter/Flickr/etc. spells the death of “old media”, but where’s the credibility that “real journalists” (mostly) had?

This is the real problem with “the wisdom of the crowd”; the crowd is mostly composed of gullible idiots.
Takuan

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Swift Loris

Twitter has postponed maintenance until tomorrow afternoon. Good for them:

“…Our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran)….”

http://tinyurl.com/ktwde6
franko

i’m following @Change_for_Iran

when he tweeted for medical help for some of the students in the riots, i was floored.
PeaceNerd

@StopAhmadi has been going nearly constantly for the last couple days, pausing only to sleep – with a stream of pics and info
eyken

twitter goes down for an hour maintenance tonight. The Iranians aren’t just using twitter for reporting the events, but also to organize their protests. Ask @ev and @biz to delay the maintenance if possible.
eyken

#nomaintenance is now trending.
TJ S

Stream of pictures: http://picfog.com/search/iranelection
Takuan

“This is the real problem with “the wisdom of the crowd”; the crowd is mostly composed of gullible idiots.”

and they weren’t idiots under the old media? Or in the voting booth?
Takuan

meanwhile a list of countries preparing to ban Twitter quietly grows.
druranium

@ev seems to think at least one of these is really coming from iran…I’m sure they have a way of finding the origin of any user communications
http://twitter.com/ev/status/2163028119

or, he just thinks it’s interesting professional propaganda
IWood

List of English language Twitterers in Iran, by location, plus some external Twitterers and a FriendFeed link at the bottom.
Slicklines

Hate Twitter as a rule, but this is stunning and very emotional to read. Thank you for posting links for those of us (like me) who do not know the site. Feel so helpless, wishing there was something we could do as a community.
Baldhead

So… twitter actually has value aside from knowing what Ashton Kutcher decided to have for breakfast?

wow.
GuidoDavid

http://alt1040.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ishr-aldeajpg.jpeg

Remember that.

It is true today, even more than usual.
PeaceNerd

Watching this all unfold on Twitter does really bring out the maddening duality of the platform. This afternoon, I’m seeing “trending topics” of militia /moussavi khamenei / supreme leader investigation allegations fraud / march cancelled danger / mousavi rally rounds —- but also the same old idiotic memes-of-the-day like “irememberwhen” and “dontyouhateitwhen”. So massive amounts of people are using Twitter to build an earth-shaking political movement, and massive amounts of people are using Twitter to just piss away time.
entropyred

This event has essentially drawn the line in the sand for traditional journalism. Twitter might be full of chaff and unsubstantiated rumour, but it is also a source of instant information and – more importantly – empathy. Very few people connect with what they see on the news any more, but when you’re listening to a student worry about their friends who they haven’t heard from, talking about guns in the street, that’s very poignant. Twitter is beating CNN at it’s own game and since their reputation is built on 24hr instant news it doesn’t bode well for them.

There is still a lot of room for journalists to check their facts and get meaty interviews with the right people and there is still a market for quality writing – I still want the BBC or somebody to get an interview with a political leader – but it’s just a matter of doing what they can and not doing what they can’t.
The Life Of Bryan

#5: I’m no fan of Twitter either, but couldn’t your criticism (gobs of banality mixed in with the profundity) be applied equally to all parts of the web?
Church

@5 PEACENERD, Twitter is what you make it.

BTW,
148.233.239.24 Port:80
69.92.182.124 port: 2100
128.112.139.28 port 31
#iranelection #iranelections
ian_b

Iran has one of the youngest populations in the world, with a median age of 26 (compared to 36 in the US). They weren’t around to see the Shah and the revolution, so the old way of thinking isn’t that relevant. The internet has exposed them to a progressive and modern world, and they want to be a part of it. I think we’re seeing the population reach a critical mass that wants to move forward instead of being embroiled in resentment fueled by inflammatory and divisive rhetoric.

I find it interesting how this sway mirrors the recent downfall of the GOP. I wonder if they will react similarly, by becoming more hard-lined to appeal to a stubborn, but eroding base.
TJ S

#6: Good point. Very good point.

Also (learned from Twitter), it seems that at least one person is dead after Baseej opened fire in Azadi square. This from @persiankiwi, who seems to be the person to be following on Twitter right now for timely updates.
jmcgarry

#7 @Church

Via @stephenfry: Functioning Iran proxies:
218.128.112.18:8080
218.206.94.132:808
218.253.65.99:808
219.50.16.70:8080
#iranelection

(They’re timing out now though.)
AliasUndercover

The ASCII face on PersianWiki seems to sum this up well…

Good luck guys, I’ve never followed a civil war in realtime before. I guess I should get used to it.
PeaceNerd

@#6 – Not intended as criticism, just observation. Could be applied to all of humanity. Watching #iranelection on Twitterfall only confirms the power of the platform.
boatmeme

Real-time pics of #iranelection at http://twitcaps.com/search/iranelection
IWood

http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/err.html:

The maximum number of user reached,
Server is too busy, please try again later…
pentomino

I can’t wait for this week’s Tonight Show TWITTER TRACKER TWITTER TRACKER TWITTER TRACKER!!!
Dan

Weird that this isn’t getting more attention on the site. Revolution is unfolding before our eyes.
AliasUndercover

Sorry, but you can’t expect everyone to share your views of what is important, PEACENERD. Unfortunately humans are infected by human nature…
Anonymous

I’ve been using http://tehranlive.org/ and The Guardian’s liveblog (http://tinyurl.com/nx9syl)to keep in touch.
Anonymous

We post videos and coverage from the various news sources on our site. We also run a group for No Facebook Censorship in Iran. To follow our posts on twitter you can also follow VahidRazavi, AgeofNepotism, and VMAN475 on twitter. Our site http://www.TheAgeofNepotism.com is also censored and blocked but all links are going up nightly with videos posts on Twitter.
Regards,
Vahid Razavi
Author the Age of Nepotism
IWood

#18 posted by Dan:

Weird that this isn’t getting more attention on the site. Revolution is unfolding before our eyes.

I’ve been thinking about that–this is one of those times, I think, when it’s good to remember that BB isn’t really a media outlet. It’s a blog. Guatemala got a lot of attention because one of the principals (Xeni) has a personal connection there. So she went there and posted about it. I suspect we’d see the same thing about Iran if one of the BB crew had a similar connection. And, incidentally, Xeni’s been the one who’s authored the two Iran-related posts so far.

What’s really weird, to me, is the failure of the “real” news networks (see #cnnfail). Watching all of this unfold in real time, getting eyewitness reports, video, and photos on my own computer while the news channels basically give the whole thing a miss (except to air Ahmadi-Nejad’s pressers and to declare Mousavi the loser, as though it’s all settled) is a bit disorienting…but cool, at the same time. A bit of singsong I know something you don’t know in my head.
IWood

How to set up a proxy for Iranian citizens (CentOS/Redhat)
Kieran O’Neill

I chatted to one of the Persians in my lab, and he was saying that something people can do to is to write to their political leaders, asking them not to recognise the legitimacy of the election result.
tomic

I’d like to set up proxies for twitter on my well-connected server but I’m twitter illiterate (annoying fluff in the US, but clearly critical tech in times like this).

Any how-to’s anywhere on doing so? I know time is the essence here.
IWood

(And if you do set up a proxy, don’t announce it on #iranelection; apparently proxies announced there are getting shut down)
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  As CNN was airing a repeat of Larry King’s interview with the stars of American Chopper, one Atlanta resident tweeted, “Why aren’t you covering this [the Iranian protests) with everything you’ve got?”
  
  http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0834348/
  
  It’s pretty bad when IMDb is calling out CNN for poor news coverage. But seriously, more coverage would increase world sympathy for the Iranian people and that would make it harder to carpet bomb them when we’re done obliterating Iraq and Afghanistan.