Iran: Downside to the "Twitter Revolotion"

...In reality, however, this new media ecosystem is very much like the old game of “Telephone,” in which errors steadily accumulate in the transmission process, and the final message has nothing in common with the original...

...It is easy to see why so many pundits accepted this narrative: they had seen something similar before...

...To ascribe such great importance to Twitter is to disregard the fact that it is very poorly suited to planning protests in a repressive environment like Iran’s...

...Nice theory, but it has very little basis in reality...

...Thus, it’s not only its relations with key American nemeses that the Obama administration needs to reset...

...So far, its members haven’t even scratched the surface...

...getting realistic about what the Internet can and cannot do would be a good second one...

...Critics counter that the failure of the Twitter Revolution doesn’t mean that new media didn’t play an important role in it...

...In the first days after the protests, it was hard to find a television network or a newspaper (never mind the blogs) that didn’t run a feature or an editorial extolling the role of Twitter in fomenting and publicizing the Iranian protests...

...Of course, they can still guess the nature and direction of the local conversations...

...the Twitterati didn’t have much tolerance or appetite for dissent...

...whether they will be able to topple authoritarian governments is less obvious...

...Their campaign quickly went viral...

...This narrative had come to be known as “Iran’s Twitter Revolution...

...Tehran’s ‘collective action cascade’ of 2009 feels like Leipzig 1989,” tweeted Clay Shirky, new media’s favorite cheerleader, who is always au courant with latest trends...

...Knowing something about local politics is not enough to understand the role that the Internet plays in a given context...

...Some laud the emergence of this new media ecosystem: at what other point in history did we have a chance to tap directly into the thought process of young Iranians...

...The modish take of the usually sober Christian Science Monitor is representative of the heavily skewed coverage: “The government’s tight control of the Internet has spawned a generation adept at circumventing cyber roadblocks, making the country ripe for a technology– driven protest movement...

...While Clinton’s response must have pacified aging American diplomats, uneasy about the prospect of attending new-media workshops to bolster their Internet expertise, it didn’t really comport with the popular narrative of events unfolding in Tehran, at least not the one constructed by the U.S...

...Thus, to blame Andrew Sullivan for first dreaming up the “Twitter Revolution,” we have to blame a bevy of English-speaking Iranian bloggers who had shaped his opinion (many of them from the Iranian diaspora, with strong pro-Western feelings—why else blog in English...

...This only amplifies the noise...

...A few government wonks might have expected Iranians to rebel, but who could predict they would do so using Silicon Valley’s favorite toys...

...On a purely cognitive level, we are quick to make the connection between the fact that there are thousands of people marching or demonstrating in the streets and the fact that these young peoples’ Twitter updates are read by thousands (most of whom live outside of Iran...

...This dark side of the “Twitter Revolution” didn’t get much play in the media...

...Cyber-solidarity has never felt so good...

...By bashing Twitter, we are blinding ourselves to the looming age of cheap and effective Internetpowered protests that will soon extirpate all forms of authoritarianism...

...But they invariably flounder when it comes to analyzing technology’s role in global politics, offering a very parochial and superficial analysis of the situation...

...As it happens, both Twitter and Facebook give Iran’s secret services superb platforms for gathering open source intelligence about the future revolutionaries, revealing how they are connected to each other...

...He’s working on a book on how the Internet affects authoritarian states...

...Evgeny Morozov is a 2009-2010 Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University and a blogger for Foreign Policy...

...The traditional media, banned from reporting from Tehran (and, in many cases, unable to finance their stay there anyway), have to feed off the bloggers rather than do their own reporting or sift through thousands of often apocryphal posts from unknown writers...

...However, most authoritarian states are now moving in the opposite direction, eagerly exploiting cyberspace for their own strategic purposes...

...The exultant hordes of attractive, obstreperous young people, armed with fax machines and an occasional Xerox copier, taking on the brutal dictators—and winning: that already happened twenty years ago, and the venue was Eastern Europe...

...But this connection is imaginary...

...media overstate the case for the Twitter Revolution: thousands of Iranian young people may now want to experiment with Twitter and see what it has to offer...

...Even technology laggards like North Korea are increasingly accused of harboring cyberwarfare ambitions...

...A Twitter revolution is only possible in a regime where the state apparatus is completely ignorant of the Internet and has no virtual presence of its own...

...Factor in various political biases, and it becomes clear that what Andrew Sullivan is “seeing” might be radically different from what is actually happening...

...But Iran’s protests were radically different...

...blogs and Twitter accounts that looked “suspicious”— that is, appeared to be spreading “misinformation” about the venues and times of the protests as well as the reaction from authorities— were publicly named and shamed on dedicated sites (Twitterspam.com was one such site...

...After all, what could be more exciting than the prospect of attacking the evil government of Ahmadinejad from the comfort of one’s favorite caf...

...While Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” has proven to be a damp squib, members of the Obama administration have much to learn from it...

...unlike Moldova, it had a well-organized opposition that was expecting the election to be rigged and was prepared to take action...

...If Iran’s Twitter Revolution needs a godfather, Andrew Sullivan has the best credentials in town...

...government needs to be prepared to radically rethink the role of coldwarera institutions like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and deal with the fact that they may soon be less effective than the more nimble and popular platforms like Twitter and Faceebok...

...However, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khameini, who were, perhaps, even more surprised by the high-tech protests than Obama, began their ruthless crackdown, the hopes of another “velvet revolution” quickly faded away, and virtually all pundits, including Sullivan, cured themselves of their Twitter obsession almost as rapidly as they had developed it...

...Well, it’s certainly not the first revolution (albeit only a Twitter one) where well-meaning but extremely naive foreigners may have harmed their favorite causes...

...Once regimes used torture to get this kind of data...

...now it’s freely available on Facebook...

...nevertheless, it illustrates how poorly planned online activism can backfire...

...Thus, foreign supporters of the Twitter Revolution managed to do what the Iranian government couldn’t: make the Internet unusable for activists...

...Sullivan (and the Huffington Post‘s Nico Pitney) made a significant contribution to how the rest of the media—cut off from access to the streets of Tehran and unable to navigate the new media maze as effectively as well-trained bloggers— portrayed the protests...

...Today all one needs is an Internet connection...

...Today, the argument goes, we should thank Twitter for allowing us to follow them on a daily basis and in real time and—here is the punch line—to follow all of them, finally unshackling ourselves from the inherent biases of cigar-smoking and Martini-sipping white men...

...The parallels with Iran were too striking to resist...

...Thus, it’s hardly surprising that we are prone to see trends and developments that only exist in the minds of our local interlocutors...

...So, what to make of Iran’s Twitter Revolution...

...Above all, the U.S...

...in fact, it is mostly American— rather than Iranian—bloggers who are culpable for blowing the role of technology out of any reasonable proportion...

...The most curious and demanding could also use various machine translation tools that translate blogs from, say, Farsi to English...

...Moreover, they often can’t read the language and have limited information to work with...

...However, if these hip young people are our only way of getting information from the ground, it’s quite natural that we also see them as “agents of change,” who must be instrumental in organizing the protests...

...Whether technology was actually driving the protests remains a big unknown...

...Andrew Sullivan, who was tirelessly blogging about the events in Tehran for the Atlantic, emerged as one of the few comprehensive one-stop shops for real-time updates from Iran (or, to be more precise, from the Iranian Internet...

...Learning from foreign blogs is a long and tedious process...

...Is it just a gigantic exercise in collective transcontinental wishful thinking...

...Team Obama, never shy to tout its mastery of all things digital, was caught off guard and, at least for a moment or two, appeared ill-informed about the heady developments in Iranian cyberspace...

...Speaking a few days after the protests began, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confessed that she wouldn’t know “a Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently, it’s very important”— referring to Twitter, a popular mix between a blogging service and a social network that enables its users to exchange brief messages of up to 140 characters in length...

...It was the dwindling tribe of foreign correspondents that used to find those people for us and make them leading characters of their periodic, offbeat “Letter from...

...What seemed like Leipzig in 1989 was beginning to resemble Beijing of the same year...

...Many of them do offer superb analysis of technology’s role in national affairs...

...Has it upended any of our assumptions about the political power of the Internet...

...These details are now being shared voluntarily, without any external pressure...

...Judging by the flawed media coverage of the events in Tehran, the game never sounded more Iranian...

...Slacktivists may successfully grapple with corporate PR outfits that have increasingly grown fond of polluting and astroturfing cyberspace...

...They are a tiny and, most important, extremely untypical segment of the Iranian population (the number of Twitter users in Iran—a country of more than seventy million people— was estimated at less than twenty thousand before the protests...

...What these cyber-soldiers didn’t expect was that their attacks would also slow down the entire Iranian Internet, making it difficult to obtain any (even non-government) information or upload photos or videos from the protests...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Iran: Downside to the “Twitter Revolution” EVGENY MOROZOV Among the unpleasant surprises that awaited Barack Obama’s administration during the post-election turmoil in Iran, the unexpected role of the Internet must have been most rankling...

...In an interview with TED.com, Shirky claimed that “[Iran’s] is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media...

...dispatches...

...they were carefully planned and executed by the Moussavi camp...

...as well as Farsi-speaking bloggers in Tehran who had shaped the opinion of the English-speaking Iranians, and so forth...

...Learning how to distinguish a “Twitter from a tweeter” would be a good first step...

...All other biases are present as well: in a country like Iran it’s mostly pro-Western, technology-friendly and iPod-carrying young people who are the natural and most frequent users of Twitter...

...Plenty of skeptics think it was just a myth, dreamed up and advanced by cyber-utopian Western commentators, who finally got a chance to prove that the billions of hours that humanity wastes on Twitter and Facebook are not spent in vain...

...This is one subject area where they are severely inhibited by their lack of familiarity with foreign Internet cultures...

...Before they get carried away with their immutable cyber-utopianism, they’d better study the role that the Internet didn’t play as well as the reasons for it...

...Another disturbing group that suddenly got its fair share of action in cyberspace were citizen vigilantes...

...It is certainly a theory that many in the West find endearing: who would have expected that after decades of blasting propaganda from dedicated radio and television channels, Americans would be able to support democracy in Iran via blogs and social networks...

...It is, indeed, a great shortcut to viewing the photos, videos, or text updates from the Iranian streets that resurface on our favorite blogs a few hours later...

...For example, realizing that one way to help the protesters is to clog the Iranian propaganda machine, some enthusiastic American Twitterati began sharing tips on how to attack the key news Web sites of the Iranian government...

...their “cheat sheet” consists of following bilingual bloggers, who write in both their native language and English, and subscribing to blog aggregators like Global Voices Online, which purport to aggregate interesting conversations happening in non-English environments...

...It was Sullivan who famously proclaimed “The Revolution Will Be Twittered” and called Twitter “the critical tool for organizing the resistance in Iran...

...But harmless activism wasn’t very productive either: what do 100 million people invited to join the Facebook group “100 Million Facebook members for Democracy in Iran ” expect to get out of their membership...

...However, there might also be a silver lining to having the U.S...

...Do they really expect that their “slacktivism”—a catchy new word that describes such feel-good but useless Internet activism—would have some impact...

...it’s also how it thinks about the Web...

...media...

...It is, indeed, quite easy to dismiss the Twitter Revolution as a product of the wild imagination—or, perhaps, the excessive optimism—of our self-anointed Internet gurus and visionaries...

...That the Iranian opposition would venture into Twitter territory to deliberate about the best venue for its next march is ridiculous, not only because it seems pointless (after all, the Bolsheviks didn’t have to use deliberative polling to choose the Winter Palace as their target) but because the Iranian secret services would probably read these deliberations before anyone else did—and then take preemptive action...

...On first examination, the former charge has some merit...

...Getting off the lists was not easy...

...Understanding how the Internet fits a particular political and social environment is one of the most intellectually challenging tasks facing the U.S foreign policy apparatus in the next decade...

...The protests that engulfed the streets of Tehran were not spontaneous nor were they “flashmobs...

...However, in the past one needed a fortune or, at least, a good name to cause much damage...

...they happily exchange public messages with each other, creating a very dangerous trail of evidence that, sooner or later, could be used against them—in the case of Iranians, probably sooner, in court...

...The “flashmob” scenario may have worked in Moldova—the previous host of a “Twitter revolution”— where a dozen young people had, indeed, transformed a flashmob into a massive rally earlier in the year...

...Imagine a possible question: “How do you explain that a dozen suspicious Americans contacted you on Twitter...

...Tehran— caught up now in a bloodcurdling Stalinist show trial—had successfully deflected the Twitter threat, and the revolutionary spirit had been whittled down...

...it is largely useless in times of a crisis—who has time to read and translate blog posts when people are dying in the streets?—so it’s quite logical that Twitter, with its 140 character limit and its cult of immediacy, has emerged as a key source of news and updates from Tehran...

...It’s important that the old guard of American public diplomacy—entities like the Broadcasting Board of Governors—be fully prepared to satisfy these demands, embracing Twitter as a useful tool of generating and spreading views critical of regimes like Ahmadinejad’s...

...Are you a spy...

...Unfortunately, such nuances are lost on young Iranians and their foreign supporters...

...Whatever they do with Twitter may have little relevance to the rest of the country, including the masses marching in the streets...

...However, by its very design Twitter only adds to the noise: it’s simply impossible to pack much context into its 140 characters...

...what’s worse, the utopian tech-enthusiasts who advise them are constantly steering the ship in the wrong direction...