"Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran"

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb cites a comment he's seen highlighting the similarities between the violence in China's Tiananmen Square 20 years ago and the melee in Iran today, with the addition of one thing: the Internet.

Iranian authorities issued an order Tuesday restricting all journalists, including Iranians, working for foreign media from reporting from the streets of Tehran. The edict forces reporters to work only from their offices and limits them to conducting telephone interviews and citing official sources from state television reports.

With the ban on media, users on social networking sites like Twitter have upped their efforts to provide first-hand, real-time news.

The Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies in London said in a statement:

"They've cut off telephone, e-mail, texting, and for foreign press issued a letter saying nobody can report without permission…Twitter is the one thing being used. It’s a sign of crackdown. They don’t want people outside Iran to see what’s going on there."

As the embattled regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seemingly cuts off Iran from the rest of the world, Iranians are working around the restrictions by blogging, posting to Facebook, and organizing protests on Twitter.

Twitterers post messages with the term #IranElection, allowing users to search all tweets on the subject. #IranElection is now a top trending topic and Twitter was registering about 30 news posts a minute with that tag, according to The New York Times.

The feed "mousavi1388" (named for Ahmadinajad’s leading opposition candidate Hussein Moussavi) has more than 11,000 followers and is filled with protest news, links to photos and encouragement to keep fighting, both in English and Farsi.

One poster wrote:

"We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Moussavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection"

And Twitter is well aware of the importance of its site. The San Francisco-based social networking service delayed a planned upgrade, citing "the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran."

Mousavi himself has used text messages, Facebook, and Twitter to reach out to voters. His Facebook page has attracted more than 54,000 fans, and his slogan during the election was "Every citizen is the media."

A highly computer-literate society with a large number of bloggers and hackers (see this video about the importance of Iran's bloggers), the people of Iran have used Tweets, blog posts, photos, and raw video to give themselves a voice. A Washington Times editorial opines:

"What we are seeing is the flickering flame of freedom…The people of Iran are exercising their sovereign right as a people to stand before their rulers and say 'No more.' They are commanding the attention of a world that seeks to make deals with their oppressors. Iranians are telling us that they yearn to be free."

Commanding the attention of the world in 140 characters or less ... that's power to the people.

-Allison Louie-Garcia

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Article: HERE


Find Iran Twitter Feeds: HERE