A critical communication tool

Legalbrief reports that because foreign journalists were expelled from Iran or confined to their hotel rooms during the protests sparked by the contested elections, Twitter became a critical communication tool. And Internet users across the world tuned in to people in Iran, who were using blogs, YouTube and social networking sites to spread information that would otherwise not have reached a wide audience. As protests began to flare on streets across Iran, 10.5m American television-viewers naturally turned to CNN, a cable news channel founded in 1980. It was a vote of confidence in the traditional news media. Unfortunately, instead of protests, many of them saw CNN's veteran, Larry King, interviewing burly motorcycle-builders. The programme was a repeat. No other American television news programme, cable or broadcast, did better (though the BBC and Al-Jazeera were both swifter and more plugged-in). The Economist report notes that Twitter and YouTube carried a stream of reports, pictures and film from Iran's streets. The Internet also facilitated media criticism. Twitter hosted an extraordinary outburst of fury against CNN and other news organisations. A typical post: 'Iran went to hell. Media went to bed.' For a while it looked like a clear-cut victory of new media over old. The social networking site, which allows users to post messages, or 'tweets', of up to 140 characters, has shown itself perfectly suited to a fast-moving situation where there is a thirst for snatches of information in real time. A Mail & Guardian Online report says that if the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 was the moment when blogging arrived in the news, Iran's elections will be remembered by many as a Twitter crisis. Full report in The Economist Full Mail & Guardian Online report

Popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay said it helped launch an Internet network in support of Iranian election critics, allowing users to dodge the regime's censorship rules by surfing anonymously. According to a Sympatico report, The Pirate Bay, whose operators were convicted in April of helping others commit copyright violations, temporarily changed its logo to 'The Persian Bay' with a link to a protest forum. WA Today reports that online allies have set up scores of 'proxy servers', Internet linked computers that can be used by people inside Iran to get around blocks imposed to stifle the spread of news about demonstrators accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of having stolen the presidential election instead of winning it. Twitter has been at the heart of Iran's resistance since the election, so much so that the site's owners, based in San Francisco, agreed to postpone routine maintenance of the site. However, BBC News notes that Twitter later distanced itself from the State Department, saying 'it does not have access to our decision making process.' Neverteless, The New York Times notes that with no diplomatic relations and with foreign journalists largely expelled from the country, the Obama administration which was already struggling to make sense of Iran, finds itself picking up tidbits about the crisis in the same ways private citizens do. Full Sympatico report Full WA Today report Full BBC News report Full report in The New York Times

Early last year, the first reports of the earthquake in China's Sichuan province broke on Twitter, while the end of 2008 saw users document the Mumbai attacks for a global audience before the news networks had got on to the story. According to a Mail & Guardian Online report, the first images of the US Airways craft that crash-landed in New York's Hudson River, meanwhile, prompted the BBC to call it 'a classic of the new age of citizen journalism'. As a result, what started as an experiment between a handful of employees has now found itself reaching a strange crossroads where society, technology and politics interact with each other, sometimes with profound effects. The use of Twitter to spread information about the unrest in Iran can teach businesses valuable lessons about the flow of information in their organisations, according to leading lights of the IT security world. Howard Schmidt, president of the Information Security Forum, told ZDNet News that businesses need to recognise that technology such as instant messaging can be used to improve information flows, while still maintaining security. 'Instant messaging has been blocked for a long time, especially by financial-services companies,' said Schmidt. 'But it's easy to have IM (instant messenger), based on an internal server, with security controls. A knee-jerk reaction just to block information is not helpful.' An analysis of the network traffic in and out of Iran over the last few days during the turmoil surrounding the election is offering a clearer picture of how the manipulation of Internet traffic within the country is affecting access to certain kinds of online content. Computer World reports that the analysis, by Arbor Networks, is based on security, traffic and routing data gathered by over 100 of ISP customers in 17 countries. What it shows is that in the one week or so since the contentious elections, Web and video traffic and most forms of interactive communications have been severely impacted inside Iran. Web traffic to and from Iran has dropped by 50%, suggesting that Internet administrators are blocking those within the country from accessing a large number of Web sites, said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor. Full Mail & Guardian Online report Full ZDNet News report Full Computer World report

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn't caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it certainly helped. CNET News reports that social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months - in Moldova in April and in Iran this past week. But does the label Twitter Revolution oversell the technology? The report says sceptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organise protests in Iran and that other means - individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites - were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. Full CNET News report

Spammers are never far from a hot story, it seems, and they've been flooding Twitter with phoney messages about Iran and the latest iPhone 3.0 operating system. Computer World reports that in one campaign, the spammers set up fake Twitter accounts and posted Twitter messages that link to a Web site promoting male enhancement products. Spammers are also trying to cash in on the intense interest in the disputed Iranian election, posting messages such as 'Mousavi trend? omg stephen colbert hit a woman.earned $2,612 thanks to this.' Mir Hossein Mousavi is the reformist politician whose defeat in the presidential contest sparked the protests. Full Computer World report