The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [13]
None of this seems to be the case. The digital witch hunts put on by the Iranian government may have been targeting imaginary enemies, created in part by the worst excesses of Western media and the hubris of Western policymakers. Two uncertainties remain to this day. First, how many people inside Iran (as opposed to those outside) were tweeting about the protests? Second, was Twitter actually used as a key tool for organizing the protests, as many pundits implied, or was its relevance limited only to sharing news and raising global awareness about what was happening?
On the first question, the evidence is at best inconclusive. There were indeed a lot of Iran-related tweets in the two weeks following the election, but it is impossible to say how many of them came from Iran as opposed to, say, its three-million-strong diaspora, sympathizers of the Green Movement elsewhere, and provocateurs loyal to the Iranian regime. Analysis by Sysomos, a social media analysis company, found only 19,235 Twitter accounts registered in Iran (0.027 percent of the population) on the eve of the 2009 elections. As many sympathizers of the Green Movement began changing their Twitter location status to Tehran to confuse the Iranian authorities, it also became nearly impossible to tell whether the people supposedly “tweeting” from Iran were in Tehran or in, say, Los Angeles. One of the most active Twitter users sharing the news about the protests, “oxfordgirl,” was an Iranian journalist residing in the English county of Oxfordshire. She did an excellent job—but only as an information hub.
Speaking in early 2010, Moeed Ahmad, director of new media for Al-Jazeera, stated that fact-checking by his channel during the protests could confirm only sixty active Twitter accounts in Tehran, a number that fell to six once the Iranian authorities cracked down on online communications. This is not to understate the overall prominence of Iran-related news on Twitter in the first week of protests; research by Pew Research Center found that 98 percent of all the most popular links shared on the site during that period were Iran-related. It’s just that the vast majority of them were not authored or retweeted by those in Iran.
As for the second question, whether Twitter was actually used to organize rather than simply publicize the protests, there is even less certainty. Many people who speak Farsi and who have followed the Iranian blogosphere over the years are far more doubtful than outside observers. A prominent Iranian blogger and activist known as Vahid Online, who was in Tehran during the protests, doubts the validity of the Twitter Revolution thesis simply because few Iranians were tweeting. “Twitter never became very popular in Iran. [But] because the world was watching Iran with such [great interest] during those days, it led many to believe falsely that Iranian people were also getting their news through Twitter,” says the blogger.
Twitter was used to post updates about the time and venue of the protests, but it’s not clear whether this was done systematically and whether it actually brought in any new crowds onto the streets. That the Green Movement strategically chose Twitter—or, for that matter, any other Internet technology—as their favorite tool of communication is most likely just another myth. On the contrary, the Iranian opposition did not seem to be well-organized, which might explain why it eventually fizzled. “From the beginning, the Green Movement was not created and did not move forward [in an organized manner]—it wasn’t like some made a decision and informed others. When you’d walk in the streets, at work, wherever you’d go, people were talking about it and