The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [14]
The West, however, wasn’t hallucinating. Tweets did get sent, and crowds did gather in the streets. This does not necessarily mean, however, that there was a causal link between the two. To put it more metaphorically: If a tree falls in the forest and everyone tweets about it, it may not be the tweets that moved it. Besides, the location and timing of protests were not exactly a secret. One didn’t need to go online to notice that there was a big public protest going on in the middle of Tehran. The raging horns of cars stuck in traffic were a pretty good indicator.
In the collective euphoria that overtook the Western media during the events in Iran, dissenting voices—those challenging the dominant account that emphasized the Internet’s role in fomenting the protests—received far less prominence than those who cheered the onset of the Twitter Revolution. Annabelle Sreberny, professor of global media and communications at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and an expert on the Iranian media, quickly dismissed Twitter as yet another hype—yet her voice got lost in the rest of the twitter-worshipping commentary. “Twitter was massively overrated.... I wouldn’t argue that social media really mobilised Iranians themselves,” she told the Guardian. Hamid Tehrani, the Persian editor of the blogging network Global Voices, was equally skeptical, speculating that the Twitter Revolution hyperbole revealed more about Western new media fantasies than about the reality in Iran. “The west was focused not on the Iranian people but on the role of western technology,” says Tehrani, adding that “Twitter was important in publicising what was happening, but its role was overemphasised.”
Many other members of the Iranian diaspora also felt that Twitter was getting far more attention than it deserved. Five days after the protests began, Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of Balatarin, a Los Angeles-based Farsi-language news site similar to Digg.com, told the Washington Post that “Twitter’s impact inside Iran is zero.... Here [in the United States], there is lots of buzz, but once you look ... you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.”
That the Internet may have also had a negative impact on the protest movement was another aspect overlooked by most media commentators. An exception was Golnaz Esfandiari, an Iranian correspondent with Radio Free Europe, who, writing in Foreign Policy a year after the 2009 Iranian elections, deplored Twitter’s “pernicious complicity in allowing rumors to spread.” Esfandiari noticed that “in the early days of the post-election crackdown a rumor quickly spread on Twitter that police helicopters were pouring acid and boiling water on protesters. A year later it remains just that: a rumor.”
Esfandiari also noted that the story of the Iranian activist Saeedeh Pouraghayi—who was supposedly arrested for chanting “Allah Akbar” on her rooftop, raped, disfigured, and murdered, becoming the martyr of the Green Movement—which made the rounds on Twitter, turned out to be a hoax. Pouraghayi later resurfaced in a broadcast on Iranian state television, saying that she had jumped off a balcony on the night she had been arrested and stayed low for the next few months. A reformist website later claimed that the story of her murder was planted by the Iranian government to discredit reports of other rapes. It’s not obvious which side gained more from the hoax and its revelation, but this is exactly the kind of story Western journalists should have been investigating.
Sadly, in their quest to see Ahmadinejad’s regime fall at the mercy of tweets, most journalists preferred to look the other way and produce upbeat copy about the emancipatory nature of the Twitter Revolution. As pundits were competing for airtime and bloggers were competing for eyeballs, few bothered to debunk the overblown claims about the power of the Internet. As a result, the myth of Iran’s Twitter Revolution soon joined the gigantic pile of other urban myths about