TWITTER & THE IRANIAN UPRISING

By JULIA DAY, STEPS Centre member

Like many, I have been following recent events in Iran with interest. The use of social media (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc) via mobile and the net to organise and reveal ordinary Iranians’ perspectives has been fascinating and ground-breaking.

Timothy Garton Ash says in today’s Guardian: “Probably the single most important thing the US state department has done for Iran recently was to contact Twitter over the weekend, to urge it to delay a planned upgrade that could have taken down service to Iranians for some crucial hours of people power ­protest. Welcome to the new politics of the 21st century.”

Sky News reports: “2.25 million blog posts were written about Iran in the last 24 hours, a significant sign of the way the political crisis in Tehran has captured the attention of a global web audience. But in a single hour on Wednesday, more than 220,000 messages on that topic were sent via Twitter.” Although it is getting harder to find tweets from inside Iran, says the report.

If you want to have a look at some of the activity, here are some links, but please do note that there are some graphic violent images flying around, particularly on the Flickr site:

YouTube: Iran videos

Twitter feeds:
#IranElection
#Iranvote

Flickr: Iran feed