[Infowarrior] - Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online

[Richard Forno]

une 16, 2009
Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online
By BRAD STONE and NOAM COHEN

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/world/middleeast/16media.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears  
to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new  
kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of  
state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around  
the restrictions.

Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly,  
coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their  
activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential election  
on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor  
their online communications.

On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march  
through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and  
casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on  
the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics.

A couple of Twitter feeds have become virtual media offices for the  
supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi.  
One feed, mousavi1388 (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar), is  
filled with news of protests and exhortations to keep up the fight, in  
Persian and in English. It has more than 7,000 followers.

Mr. Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook has swelled to over 50,000  
members, a significant increase since election day.

Labeling such seemingly spontaneous antigovernment demonstrations a  
“Twitter Revolution” has already become something of a cliché. That  
title had been given to the protests in Moldova in April.

But Twitter is aware of the power of its service. Acknowledging its  
role on the global stage, the San Francisco-based company said Monday  
that it was delaying a planned shutdown for maintenance for a day,  
citing “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important  
communication tool in Iran.”

Twitter users are posting messages, known as tweets, with the term  
#IranElection, which allows users to search for all tweets on the  
subject. On Monday evening, Twitter was registering about 30 new posts  
a minute with that tag.

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

The Twitter feed StopAhmadi calls itself the “Dedicated Twitter  
account for Moussavi supporters” and has more than 6,000 followers. It  
links to a page on the photo-hosting site Flickr that includes dozens  
of pictures from the rally on Monday in Tehran.

The feed Persiankiwi, which has more than 15,000 followers, sends  
users to a page in Persian that is hosted by Google and, in its only  
English text, says, “Due to widespread filters in Iran, please view  
this site to receive the latest news, letters and communications from  
Mir Hussein Moussavi.”

Some Twitter users were also going on the offensive. On Monday  
morning, an antigovernment activist using the Twitter account  
“DDOSIran” asked supporters to visit a Web site to participate in an  
online attack to try to crash government Web sites by overwhelming  
them with traffic.

By Monday afternoon, many of those sites were not accessible, though  
it was not clear if the attack was responsible — and the Twitter  
account behind the attack had been removed. A Twitter spokeswoman said  
the company had no connection to the deletion of the account.

The crackdown on communications began on election day, when text- 
messaging services were shut down in what opposition supporters said  
was an attempt to block one of their most important organizing tools.  
Over the weekend, cellphone transmissions and access to Facebook and  
some other Web sites were also blocked.

Iranians continued to report on Monday that they could not send text  
messages.

But it appears they are finding ways around Big Brother.

Many Twitter users have been sharing ways to evade government  
snooping, such as programming their Web browsers to contact a proxy —  
or an Internet server that relays their connection through another  
country.

Austin Heap, a 25-year-old information technology consultant in San  
Francisco, is running his own private proxies to help Iranians, and is  
advertising them on Twitter. He said on Monday that his servers were  
providing the Internet connections for about 750 Iranians at any one  
moment.

“I think that cyber activism can be a way to empower people living  
under less than democratic governments around the world,” he said.

Global Internet Freedom Consortium, an Internet proxy service with  
ties to the banned Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, offers  
downloadable software to help evade censorship. It said its traffic  
from Iran had tripled in the last week.

Shiyu Zhou, founder of the organization, has no idea how links to the  
software spread within Iran. “In China we have sent mass e-mails, but  
nothing like in Iran,” he said. “The Iranian people actually found out  
by themselves and have passed this on by word of mouth.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School who is an expert  
on the Internet, said that Twitter was particularly resilient to  
censorship because it had so many ways for its posts to originate —  
from a phone, a Web browser or specialized applications — and so many  
outlets for those posts to appear.

As each new home for this material becomes a new target for  
censorship, he said, a repressive system faces a game of whack-a-mole  
in blocking Internet address after Internet address carrying the  
subversive material.

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the  
world,” Mr. Zittrain said. “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane  
and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”