The Philippine Online Chronicles

The revolution will not be televised; it will be Twittered. Or so says the worldwide digital community as it watches what could be the very first political event in which the Internet is a major player.

In the past weeks, Iran has been shaken by massive post-election protests as opposition supporters cried foul over presidential election results in what is being considered the biggest popular upheaval since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Back in 1979, Iranians loyal to the then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini aired their views via radio. The views of participants in the ongoing protest actions are being broadcast all across the world through social networking sites or what is popularly known as Web 2.0.

Disputed elections

The presidential election last June 12 had more than 46 million eligible Iranian voters choosing among four candidates. After the polls, both the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reformist opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi claimed victory.

The non-cleric Ahmadinejad has been Iran’s president since 2005. He was previously the mayor of Tehran and was actively involved in the Islamic revolution of 1979.

“He is a hard-liner both at home - where he does not favour the development or reform of political institutions - and abroad, where he has maintained an anti-Western attitude and combative stance on Tehran's nuclear program,” added the BBC.

Many of his supporters come from poorer and more religious sections of Iran's rapidly growing population, particularly outside Tehran.

Mousavi, on the other hand, is Iran’s former prime minister. His wife Zahra Rahnavard campaigned alongside him, unusual for Iran given its conservative customs regarding the participation of women in the political sphere.

One of his closest associates and backers in the election was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran who now heads two of the regime's most powerful bodies - the Expediency Council (which adjudicates disputes over legislation) and the Assembly of Experts (which appoints, and can theoretically replace, the Supreme Leader).

According to BBC, the interior ministry announced that Ahmadinejad won by a landslide, garnering 63 percent of the votes cast against Mousavi’s 34 percent. Ahmadinejad's supporters took to the streets waving green flags and sounding car horns in victory celebrations while Mousavi's supporters, angered by the election results, mobilized by the hundreds of thousands in Tehran shouting “Where is my vote?”

The opposition demonstrations led to bloodshed as eight people were reportedly killed after pro-government militia or the Basijs opened fire against protesters in an effort to quell all unauthorized protests.

Joe Fay of The Register said, “Reform-minded Iranians, incensed at what they see as the government's stealing of the election, took to Twitter et al to claim that Mousavi had in fact beaten Ahamdinejad by over three to one, and to encourage their compatriots to take to the streets. People certainly took to the streets, where there were vicious clashes.”

These were captured in photos and recordings that quickly found their way onto photo and video-sharing sites like Flickr and Youtube.

Despite Mousavi’s encouragement of peaceful demonstrations and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s call for an official inquiry and partial recount, opposition protests in Tehran and major cities like Mashhad, Isfahan and Shiraz continued, resulting in violent confrontations between  security forces and anti-government demonstrators.

All lines dead

During the elections, most of Iran was disconnected from all types of communications.

An entry in a community formed in Livejournal reported that email and messaging systems like Gmail, GTalk, Yahoo and AIM are shut down by the government, as well as web access and Iranian ISPs. Government experts are supposedly trying to close down traffic in Twitter.

Cellphones and SMS have also been shut down. People are also receiving phone calls from the government saying "We know you were in the protests."

Other reports said that government filters have also cracked down on opposition party websites and social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook. Satellite internet connections have also been disrupted.

The foreign media in Iran are also facing “sweeping restrictions” as they need to secure official permission from the government to attend or report on demonstrations. The Iranian authorities even jammed BBC Persian language broadcasts.

Reports leaked out of the country say military and police forces have taken over Tehran's streets. The Ministry of Interior doubling as election headquarters - was isolated by concrete barriers. Iranian TV switched to old Iron Curtain-style "messages of national unity.”

With traditional forms of communication blocked, Iranians are using technology to keep connected to the world in ways that the state-controlled media are not willing to do. Bloggers and activists reporting from Iran are evading the controls via proxy servers, which can disguise a user’s location, to be able to organize themselves and send information to the world.

"The whole world is watching"

Various blogs and social networking sites were flooded with updates regarding the events in Iran. In an instant, the microblog site Twitter became an important, powerful weapon for the Iranian people who want to tell the world what is happening in their country.

Jenny Simpson, spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based company, acknowledged this in a statement: “We realize Twitter is playing an important role in the events taking place in Iran. We’ve seen many instances of people using Twitter to communicate when there was no other way.”

Throughout the connection outages in Iran, “Twitter users in Iran have shared pictures from street protests, passed on information about which cities are affected by internet and mobile phone outages and planned rallies and further protests.”

In Washington, United States President Barack Obama expressed deep concern over the happenings in Iran. He urged Iranian authorities “to halt all violent and unjust actions against its own people," and said the U.S. "stands by all who seek to exercise" the universal right to assembly and free speech.

The U.S. State Department emailed Twitter to ask them to postpone scheduled maintenance of its global network in order to avoid interruption of service to desperate Iranians.

Huffington Post noted that, “The Obama administration has demonstrated decidedly its belief in the transformative power of the Internet and the tools of Web 2.0, and sees an opportunity in Iran to put these tools to work.”

Hashtags like #iranelection which started on Twitter have attracted huge numbers of followers, according to bbc.co.uk.

Startling images from the streets of Tehran are being disseminated through Twitter and quickly spreading to various social media. These tweets often link to a YouTube clip, thus further increasing the audience. One Twitter user in Iran named @persiankiwi has attracted over 10,000 followers.

A blogger said that #iranelection “chirps 40 and 50 new messages at a time. Pictures, video, and reports are coming through from people on the streets in Iran by the second.”

Twitter has indeed taken a center stage in the events as the main source of news from Iran. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates subsequently called Twitter a huge strategic asset.

Cyber wars

Iranian bloggers are getting full support from the World Wide Web in launching a cyber war against the Iran administration that allegedly ‘rigged the elections.’

Boingboing.net posted a ‘Cyberwar guide’ on how netizens can help Twitter users and bloggers in Iran. The main directives – Don't publicize proxy Web addresses that are allowing protesters to get around government intervention; use the right hashtags for passing along information; know that government security may be setting up fake accounts to stage traps and pass along bad info; and make your Twitter settings on local Tehran time to confuse militia hunting down dissidents.

The technology savvy population in Iran has also launched cyber attacks against the establishment. “More and more of Iran’s pro-government websites are under assault, as opposition forces launch web attacks on the Tehran regime’s online propaganda arms.”

There are also reports of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDOS) being launched. Page Reboot.com is reportedly being used by opposition supporters to send massive amounts of traffic to Iranian government sites to temporarily shut the service down. The website WhereIsMyVote.info (now offline) is opening up 16 Page Reboot windows simultaneously, to flood an array of government pages at once.

The official site of President Ahmadinejad is said to be displaying the message: “The maximum number of users reached, Server is too busy, please try again later.” A user tweeted, “Iranian gvmt is blocking out all INTERNET/SMS/PHONE - as long as they do this, we cut down THEIR sites.”

Developers and technology experts are also devising ways to work around the government crackdown. Instructions are available on how to set up “proxies” or intermediary internet protocol (IP) address that allow activists to get through the government firewall.

Associated Press reported that U.S. web users set up ways for Iranians to access the internet using Tor, a service that allows people use the internet anonymously.

“FreeAccess Plus!” Firefox extension was recently released by Iranian developer MohammadR. This ingenious extension turns Firefox into a proxy that bypasses censorship on popular Web 2.0 websites such as YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, Friendster, Livejournal, MySpace, Hi5 and other social networking sites barred in Iran.

Globavoicesonline.com said MohammedR hopes that his “FreeAccess Plus!” plugin will serve his fellow citizens and Iranian bloggers who were unhappy about the unreasonable blocking of Web 2.0 and social networking websites” by helping them bypass the censorship targeting the social web.

“Although communication is very hard inside Iran, people's e-mails are still working and that is how they are exchanging information,” according to one source. "As the state tries to control access to the internet portals so the protesters are sending messages to each other on how to evade the government portals."

New liberation technologies

The power of the internet, digital and social media empowered the people in Iran.

Armed with nothing but their conviction, camera phones  and internet connection, Iran’s younger, internet savvy generation are rocking the center of power in Tehran. “Hundreds of images captured on their mobile phones were telling the story of this crisis,” a reporter said. As Techcruch.com noted, “a cell phone is all that is needed to report to the world.”

A YouTube spokesperson said there had been an increase in activity for all types of videos related to the Iranian election. He added, “people were turning to the video-sharing website to get the latest from people on the ground who had "uploaded their experiences live and in the midst of the action."

YouTube was said to be getting only 10 percent of its normal traffic from Iran, indicating a block. In a statement, the company reiterated “that it allows clips depicting violence there and elsewhere because of their journalistic merit. Although it generally bans videos with graphic or gratuitous violence, YouTube has long made exceptions for clips with educational, documentary of scientific value.”

An editorial noted, "The ability to send graphic, near live-time footage, often then uploaded to YouTube elsewhere is an incredibly powerful tool.”

On Facebook, Mousavi supporters organized protests through his public page and posted photos, videos and messages in Farsi. As of June 18, he had more than 66,000 supporters on the site.

Citing the events and the need for Iranians to be able to communicate in their own language, both Google and Facebook launched Farsi services, according to Associated Press.

In TechNewsWorld, University of Georgia Prof. Ann Hollifield said, “Social media tools are just the latest in a long line of 'liberation technologies' that have helped entire populations change the world.”

“Twitter is less than 3 years old, YouTube is over 4 years old. Facebook is over 5 years old. These tools are new, are evolving rapidly, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

Meanwhile, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) “sees Twitter and Facebook as extraordinarily powerful tools for freedom, especially in the hands of young adults.”

Leslie Harris of CDT said,"these sites didn't create a revolution. But they provide essential tools for civil rights and democracy."

More than half of Iran’s population are youth aged below 30, most of them born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Washington Times noted, “Iran is a highly computer-literate society with a large number of bloggers and hackers.”

Many have complained that U.S.-based television networks were too slow to pick up the story on Iran, and that Twitter succeeded where mainstream media failed. Brian Stelter of The New York Times even reported that “folks weren't only using Twitter to report about Iran, but to complain about CNN's failure to report through the hashtag #CNNfail.”

Former NBC producer Hanson Hosein, now director of digital media at University of Washington, wrote in his blog that with the events in Iran, “Twitter has finally arrived as a journalism tool.”

Hosein himself was fascinated as he watched the stories in Iran unfold in real time in social media. He said of the use of Twitter in Iran, “It's more than breaking news… it’s actually a movement. Wonderfully powerful and a little bit intimidating, but you have to keep your skeptical hat on."

An Informationweek.com columnist explained his thoughts why the Twitter revolution is suspect. He said, “Twitter has gone from a startup to celebrity plaything. Now, in the case of the election demonstrations in Tehran, it's apparently a serious tool of U.S. foreign policy.”

He added, “The real value of Twitter isn't in the specific platform or company, it's in a style of communication: Short messages that anyone can read, broadcast in realtime, like a single chatroom the size of the whole world.”

Hollifield on the other hand believes that unlike past liberation technologies like faxes and radio, current social media may “prove tougher for governments to suppress because of the mobile aspects of social media.”

In the Philippines, networks opposing the Arroyo administration’s Charter Change and Constituent Assembly moes are using social media and web tools to propagate their positions. On the ground reporting of the June 10 anti-Con Ass rally in Makati was also spread in Twitter, Facebook and Plurk.

In Facebook, the cause “No to Con-Ass” had generated more than 80,000 members. Some of its members gathered offline to discuss upcoming actions.

Real world

As Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society stressed, “the online outpouring has been hugely important for letting the wider world feel solidarity with the protesters, and in bringing attention to the issues.” But, he added, “probably not that important in actually mobilizing people on the ground."

Digital media consultant Andrew Rosen even said, “this technology revolution does not present a political alternative to the Vayelat-al-Faqih. Mousavi is an alternative to Ahmadinejad. He has not positioned himself as an alternative to Khameini. If the technology revolution in ascendancy wins out, can the U.S. or the region handle a wide swath of instability cutting across an unstable Iraq, an unstable Iran, an unstable Afghanistan, and an unstable Pakistan?”

As of now, more protests and clashes between Iranian civilians and military are happening in Iran.