Today, the Washington Post posted an opinion piece on the role of Twitter in the current situation in Iran. It was at best ignorant and at worst deliberately misleading, so I tried my best to tell them so. I’m posting my response here, as well, because come on, it’s not like anyone is reading this!
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This article is awfully disingenuous and almost comes off as traditional media whining that they still matter. No one is claiming Twitter will bring the revolution. There is no Green Wave manifesto floating around Twitter in a thousand 140 character sections. What it HAS done is allow some of the demonstrators to organize when every other form of communication (apart from word of mouth) has been shut down. It, along with YouTube, has allowed these same people to inform the rest of the world what is happening on the streets, something that traditional media was initially indifferent to and by the time they realized what was going on they found themselves locked out of the country. Even now nearly every bit of timely news that appears on CNN, Fox, et al is coming directly from YouTube and Twitter and Mousavi’s Facebook page.
You’re correct in saying that Iran could simply attempt to pull the plug on the entire internet, it’s really the only thing they CAN do to stop it. The fact that they haven’t is telling in its own right. Yes, the government has begun spreading disinformation through Twitter, but it’s worth noting that it took them almost three days to think of doing it, at which point the trustworthy sources were already well known. It was too late, and therein lies the real point: Twitter is a tool, one that has helped to facilitate what is going on on the ground in Iran. It did not bring it about. Is there anyone here who thinks these protests wouldn’t be happening if not for Twitter? What it DID do is make this entire situation more complicated and more dangerous for Ahmadinejad. It made the movement more powerful than it would have been otherwise.
The other real lesson here is that the people on the ground will always be one step ahead of entrenched governments in using methods of communication that cannot be silenced. Yes, at some point governments will understand how to stop Twitter as a tool, but by then those who are using it now will have already moved on to a newer method that those in power won’t understand until it’s too late.