Re: Twitter and Iran Elections

Thanks for raising this.

On 16/6/09 20:46, Harry Halpin wrote:
> I'm sure everyone has now heard about the roll Twitter is playing in
> the current protests in Iran (apparently 15,000 tweets an hour, which
> I'm trying to follow rather unsuccessfully). In particular, it has
> received lots of news coverage [1] as Iran has shut down Facebook [2]
> (although apparently now access is unblocked, which should be familiar
> to those of us who remember Iran filtering Orkut.

Yeah, a lot has changed since 
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/07/2252220&tid=153&tid=95 ...

In Jan 2005, there wasn't yet a lot of discussion about social network 
portability, interop, mobility etc. Orkut was something like 20% or more 
Iranian, until they were removed overnight by ISP-level blocks.

The big different today seems to be APIs. Even if Twitter is 
centralised, ... the possibilities for proxied and indirected access are 
much greater, since code can legitimately hold posting credentials. When 
Orkut was blocked, there were efforts like OrkutProxy, but ultimately 
they were also blocked at the Google side, since Google didn't want user 
passwords going thru an intermediary. I don't know the Twitter API but I 
know they have OAuth efforts underway, which takes away some of these 
concerns.


> This got me thinking of the importance of open social networking and
> open micro-blogging, and how if these technologies were more widely
> people in Iran might not have such a precarious grip on what are now
> clearly important journalistic and political tools - after all,
> Twitter would have gone for scheduled maintenance apparently, leaving
> some of its users in Iran without Twitter, had it not been for
> intervention by the U.S. Yet, would it not be better to have a
> technical solution rather than rely on the U.S. govt. asking Twitter
> not to postpone their maintenance?

There is an active Iran group on Identi.ca, although most of the action 
seems over on Twitter.  http://identi.ca/group/iran

I have had brief discussions with Evan Prodromou (identi.ca), Peter St 
Andre (XMPP) and Hamed Saber 
(http://globalvoicesonline.org/2007/02/14/access-flickr-iran/) on this 
theme recently, due to that brief mention of a "new online network" from 
Obama during the Cairo speech - 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_speech_at_Cairo_University,_2009 -
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09/

... since that said, "On education we will [...] ...and create a new 
online network, so a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly 
with a young person in Cairo."

I'm trying to find out what was meant by this, since it could mean 
anything from a website to identi.ca/xmpp to a facebook group.

> So, to sketch a use case - how can investment in such an open stack
> help people not have their social web services so easily shut down,
> either inadvertently (such as when a server crashes) or on purpose
> (such as a government using the domain name system or legal threats to
> shut down a single social networking or blogging site)?
>
> I'd like to hear thoughts, and especially links to enlightening news
> stories or use-cases?

I blogged something related today - looking at the sheer chaos of the 
twitter posts and re-posts, where misinformation and disinformation echo 
around. http://danbri.org/words/2009/06/16/415 ... but that's more from 
a journalistic perspective of trying to extract a more reliable 
narrative from the noise, as well as giving people better tooling. I'm 
told the concept of "re-tweet" (well, re-dent) will be in a future 
identica/laconica release. This should make it easier to 
programmatically retrace the sourcing of microblog'd comment...

cheers,

Dan


> [1]http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/twitter.iran.tweets.2.1046306.html
> [2]http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2009/05/iran-ahmadinejad-islam-facebook-social-networking-mousavi-tehran.html
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 16 June 2009 19:09:23 UTC