Following the disputed election in Iran a number of interesting things have happened in Cyberspace. As we saw some time ago in Moldova, social networking tools are showing their worth as political force amplifiers.
Supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, one of the presidential candidates in Iran, are using mainly Twitter to coordinate their protest efforts and to get information out of Iran. This happens round the #iranelection search tag, where people tweet updates on the situation, warnings, coordination messages and so on. As the world has focused its attention on these happenings, so have interested twitterers from around the globe; #iranelection has been on top of the most trending topics for days. Depending on time of day, there are tens to hundreds of new tweets a minute.
As with any largely anonymous news source, information via tweets must be taken with spades of salt. The Iranian government is reportedly posting wrong and misleading information in order to f.ex. keep people away from the streets . There is anyhow plenty of low-quality messages coming from ordinary twitterers.
Actual tweets from inside Iran are the minority; the bulk of the traffic is re-tweets (RTs), messages repeated to keep them visible. This results in old tweets being re-sent, sometimes in direct contradiction to each other.
The Iranian government is also trying to limit the Twitter information flow by blocking users and domains. However, this is seemingly an impossible task.
More and more twitterers from outside Iran are joining the discussion. By setting their timezone to GMT+03.30 and location to Tehran they make it hard for the Iranian government to check and stop the information leakage. In addition, people set up twitter proxy servers faster than the Iranian governmentt can block them – all this, of course organized via Twitter.
Other actions are more direct. Some people are using distributed denial of service (DDOS) tactics to attack sites they consider to be spreading Iran government propaganda. Most of these tools are pretty basic; they usually involve more or less continuous page loads from the attacked sites.
However, there can be little doubt that other and more powerful tools are also in full swing.
This trend seems to be slowing down a bit. Not only are people pointing out that DDOS is a crime in most countries and can land you in serious trouble, but many want it stopped because it is hurting their own case.
We here at Norman strongly advice against using DDOS tactics, regardless of what kind of political sympathies one might have.
This is indeed interesting times, a teaching moment for governments and action groups alike. Social networking tools have become a system of information dissemination that makes it very hard to do effective propaganda or information control – certainly a good thing, all told.
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