Iran's having a bit of a revolution right now, and all I can do is Twitter.

[azurelunatic]

Quick recap: Iran had an election. The results of the election were ... dodgy, given that the favorite had many more supporters than there were votes counted for him. His supporters decided that a rally was in order. Government disinformation (rally is canceled, and so forth) was spread. People are communicating by any means possible there, including Twitter. All the information that the Western media is getting out of there is via the internet, via people there who are risking their lives to get it out on Twitter, on YouTube, through proxies, I believe occasionally by telephone? People there, like @StopAhmadi and @persiankiwi are acting as communications hubs with their friends, family, and contacts: tracking rumors, relaying information about where there are beatings, where there are shootings, where there are fires, whether people are taking in strangers stranded on the streets (yes).

A bit of history and some warnings.

Huffington Post liveblog coverage

Semi-organized live firehose: http://iran.twazzup.com/ (selected twitter bloggers plus relevant keywords, updating live)


If anyone wants to wade through what I already shared today from Twitter, I have this morning's tweets archived already, thanks to wibbble, who tweaked the usual posting script to run twice today in case I overloaded it (and it was a good job he did, because it would have).

Right now activists are pleading with Twitter to postpone their maintenance, because people in range of the chaos are using it as part of their communications network, and Twitter going down would endanger their lives.

People following, my dears, please take time to see to your own needs as well. Tweeting and retweeting, you are a node passing packets, and the network heals itself if one node has to go down, so long as there's a network. This is the model the internet was built on. This is how it works.

Comments

[aella_irene]

My father was in Iran at the time of the first revolution, and he's been talking about it, and says that, the last time round, it went in 40 day cycles- someone would be killed, then there would be the memorial service 40 days later, and there would be a demonstration, and people would be killed, and forty days later would come the memorial service and the demonstration, and more killings.

It sounds like this is only the beginning.

[aella_irene]

I've got a twitter account- is there anything I can do? How do you retweet?

[azurelunatic]

Retweeting is just copying what the person before you wrote; the convention is to cite them as the source of it by putting "RT @theirname" in front of what they wrote. Some Twitter programs (like Twitterfox and Tweetdeck) have a quick & semi-automatic way to do it; you can do it by hand too.

There are a couple of things that could probably need doing.

1) Pay attention to people in the thick of things and retweet the important things (some are more important than others) so that other people hear about it. (This may annoy people following you; balance the importance of what they're saying with that; use your own discretion.) If you do include #iranelection and other relevant keywords in the tweet, people who are watching those keywords have a chance of seeing it. This boosts the signal.

2) People in the thick of things may have questions about stuff, like research questions that they're not equipped to Google-dig for. Answering them can be helpful. They will also not have the attention span to dig through stuff like the #iranelection topic; you may see something in there they would want to know about.

3) People not in the thick of things may have questions about stuff. If you can track and synthesize information, you can provide recaps to people who haven't been drinking from the firehose, like I did in this post.

[aella_irene]

Thanks

[cleverthylacine]

If you use Firefox, which as I recall most LW or ex-LW people do, you can install Twitterfox. Then when you see a tweet that needs retweeting, you can right click on it and hit "Retweet" although you may have to delete characters to get the number of characters under 140.

[aella_irene]

Thank you!

[cleverthylacine]

I think it's important for people to know, because I didn't--the guy who stole this election is a fucking Holocaust denier.

[luminairex.livejournal.com]

Oh, I thought you were talking about the LJ Advisory Board elections

[azurelunatic]

Not so much, no.