Reclaim the tweets

26/06/2009

How Twitter, social networking and mobiles phones changed the way we see Iran

by Adam Forrest

The images keep on coming. Iran’s ruling forces may have tried to hold back the tide, but the world outside the country’s borders is now awash with pictures of a place we once knew little about.

We have become intimately acquainted with Tehran’s streets and public squares; its parks and universities; bikes and expensive-looking cars and, above all, its people.

A heaving, undifferentiated mass was once all the West witnessed of far-off revolutions, but now we have instant, unedited access to the faces in the crowd – a richly-detailed range of defiance, fear, excitement and rage written across the features of those determined to have their stories heard. It is doubtful the world has ever seen such widely-communicated public protests, or history documented from so many angles so quickly.

Remarkably, it’s happened during an attempted media blackout under harsh restrictions which has seen professional journalists and photographers arrested or expelled.

The development of social networking sites has allowed the mostly young, tech-savvy opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime to communicate directly with the rest of the world in a way that’s elevated Twitter from a frivolous gimmick to a powerful tool of pro-democracy activism.

Charlie Beckett, director of Polis, the London School of Economics’ media think tank, says talk of the first Twitter revolution “makes him wince slightly”, but he is excited that new media is being used so effectively during such important developments.

“When I started as a journalist,” he recalls, “the question always was, ‘Can we get a picture of this?’

"The images of Tiananmen Square came from a photographer squeezing out a couple of pictures from a distance, and was published widely only in the days afterwards. Thank God it’s a different world now. We’ve moved from an age of scarcity to abundance. Within reason, you can record just about anything.”

The state media in Iran is so heavily regulated, it comes as no surprise the urban dissidents have turned to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as their tools of expression and organisation. As well as dramatising their cause, protesters have been able to put the word out about where to gather and when to stay off the streets if Iran’s Basiji militias make protesting too dangerous.

These sites have also pushed forward the first martyr of the uprising. A gruesome video of a young woman, laid out on a Tehran street after being shot, blood pouring from her mouth and then across her face, has spread rapidly around the internet. Although her death has not been verified, the woman known as Neda Soltani has rapidly become a symbol of the regime’s crackdown on its own citizens.

Realising the media war is an increasingly-important front to fight, the government has attempted to block access to social networking sites, and reports suggest there is also a sophisticated monitoring system that may have dreadful consequences for the most active bloggers and tweeters in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, however, it has not been difficult for many to establish alternative server connections and let the world know what’s happening.

“There are so many proxy servers that pop up and it takes time for the authorities to find them and shut down, so it becomes a cat and mouse game,” says Andrew Chadwick, a co-director of the New Political Communications Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London.


Twitter was deemed important enough for the US government to temporarily break its own hands-off strategy in dealing withthe aftermath of the disputed election result. Last week the US State Department asked those running the site to delay scheduled maintenance to allow tweets to continue. YouTube broke its policy of barring violent videos, so Iranians could “capture their experiences for the world to see”.

“It’s so fast and chaotic, Twitter is potentially weak for proper, focused mobilisation,” Chadwick points out. “You don’t know what’s made up, so it’s important information is contextualised.

“But the strengths of Twitter and other sites are obvious: it’s very simple, immediate and difficult to close down. The web and distributed journalism by ordinary people is playing a similar role that satellite news did in the ‘80s. It’s important to ask – what would this episode be like without Twitter? If we relied on professional journalism, there’s so much we’d be missing.”

By the middle of last week, it was notable how many of the protesters were already carrying images of the previous day’s protests. Adorned in the green of Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s opposition party, striking gestures for each others’ cameras, the swelling numbers of the uprising were feeding on their own importance as part of a media event.

“There’s a tremendous excitement about documenting your life and telling the rest of the world, about witnessing and reporting,” says Beckett. “So everyone wants to be a journalist in a sense. Mainstream journalists ought to be a bit less grumpy about it, because we have so much more information about what’s going on there.”

Beckett also notes that the West’s focus on web-based communication since the election might have produced a slightly distorted picture of the majority opinion and the disputed result. Although 70 per cent of the country is under 30, two-thirds of Iranians are not connected to the internet.

“If Ahmadinejad’s lot had lost, would his supporters have used Twitter? No. Firstly, because they control the mainstream media – and they tend not to be so Western-facing and connected. You can start a protest with Twitter, but it’s difficult to run a government with it.”

Dr Claire Spencer, head of the Middle East programme at foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, also sounds a note of caution about the significance of the flood of images and babble of opinions pouring out of the country.

“To a certain extent, it’s an internal dispute now at the top about how the system is run, perhaps about what kind of face-saving  Ahmadinejad can retain,” she says.

“Views [at Chatham House] are divided about whether he will survive that readjustment. But most of us are now shooting in the dark about this, and all the evidence of what’s going on in the streets doesn’t actually change that.”

She believes the Ayatollah and his inner circle of clerics don’t much care about Twitter revolutions. “They are more concerned with keeping control and readjusting toward a consensus than how the outside world sees them.”

Nevertheless, the very principal of communicating with the outside world is a key reason for such strong opposition to the power structure in Iran. In the run up to election, the authorities made clear they would try to block access to Facebook, stopping many Mousavi supporters discussing the future of their country. In other words, internet access became a vote-winning issue.

“The internet is inherently decentralised and difficult to control,” agrees Chadwick. “Those values are embedded in it as a medium and it can be emblematic of Western values of freedom.

“It’s creating political movements that are flexible, informal, often short-lived, and more direct and emotional, which is what the younger opposition seem to want.”

Whatever the Byzantine machinations and power-plays around the Supreme Leader (Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamene), however many votes are left uncounted and arrests are made, the West has become connected with a new generation at odds with the mythology of a shadowy, rogue regime. The grandchildren of the Islamic revolution are only a tweet away.