Toby Young
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This is exactly the playbook that President Ahmadinejad has been following since it became clear that millions of Iranians do not accept the results of last Friday’s election. Text messaging services have been shut down and mobile phone transmissions and access to hundreds of websites, including Facebook, blocked. Newspapers are confined to reporting his 66 per cent victory at the polls.
Unfortunately for the regime, censoring Twitter has proved more difficult. Because users of the service can tweet from a wide range of platforms — web browsers, mobile phones, etc — it is difficult to shut down. If an Iran-based web server is closed, users simply re-route their messages via another server. Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, says, ‘It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.’ Twitter is the technological equivalent of the Scarlet Pimpernel: ‘They seek here, they seek him there… that damned elusive Pimpernel.’
Over the weekend, several Twitter feeds became virtual press offices for Mousavi’s campaign, attracting thousands of followers. By including the term ‘#IranElection’ in their tweets — known as a hashtag — opposition supporters could ensure they kept in touch with each other since anyone with access to Twitter could simply search that term to discover the latest news. On Monday evening, Twitter was registering 30 tweets a minute that included that hashtag. A typical example read: ‘We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Mousavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection.’
The creator of Twitter, 32-year-old Jack Dorsey, probably did not foresee this use of his service when he dreamt it up three years ago. But the company deserves credit for embracing its role in democratic reform movements — not just in Iran, but in Moldavia, too, where anti-government protests last April were also labelled a ‘Twitter Revolution’. On Monday, Twitter complied with a US State Department request to delay a scheduled 24-hour maintenance shutdown so as not to interfere with the role it was playing in Iran.
Even celebrities, the Twitter users most often singled out by its critics, have been playing their part. Stephen Fry, who boasts over 200,000 followers on the site, has been busy tweeting IP addresses and port numbers to enable Iranians to get around the government crackdown. His tweets are immediately re-tweeted by his followers — and those re-tweets are then re-tweeted again, reaching millions of people. Fry has become an intelligence asset for the Iranian opposition movement, transmitting new ways of communicating via Twitter before Ahmadinejad’s security officers have had a chance to shut them down. Thanks to Twitter, one man and his iPhone can effectively become a bigger thorn in the side of a Middle Eastern dictator than the BBC’s Persian Service, which the Iranian authorities have successfully blocked.
Most internet entrepreneurs claim that their product will change the world. In the case of Jack Dorsey, that is turning out to be true.
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