I didn’t know my first blog for Nijel would come at such a chaotic time. Just in time for what can be described as a revolution brought to you by Twitter. Iran has erupted with protests over their latest election results. The protesters believe the election loss to current president Ahmadinejad of the reformist presidential candidate Mousavi is attributable to manipulation of the election results.
I’ve been monitoring Twitter.com with #iranelection as the hashtag. Tweets are entering very quickly from supporters of the protesters. From my estimates since I started observing the situation on Sunday afternoon, there are anywhere from 20 to 500 tweets every minute. It was with amazement that I spent hours glued to Twitter attempting to collect a good picture of what is happening in my mind. Of course, people will notice what they want to notice, and omit other things; I am not immune to these things, as objective as I tried to be.

Here are what I think are the Pros and Cons of using Twitter:

Pros
Fast
Affordable (free)
Can be done via Internet or cell phone
Up to date information regarding the situation
An aggregate of worldwide opinions
Doesn’t take up a lot of bandwidth

Cons
Availability
Information distortion
Disinformation
Easily monitored by anyone
Spammers taking advantage of the #IranElection popularity to self-promote

Despite the pros and cons, I believe that Twitter has been absolutely vital at this point. Many news outlets spoke more about the Tweeting of the revolution more than the revolution itself. We even tweeted requests to Twitter to delay scheduled downtime in order to allow people to continue tweeting. There are a lotof people offering technological assistance such as providing proxies for people to get around state blockage, translating from Farsi to English and other languages. I made a graphic for my profiles, and helped re-Tweet (dubbed as RT in the Twitter lexicon) vital information to get it through the less important fodder that is currently taking up most of the Tweets. There were also people wearing green to show their support.

There were several Tweet debates that happened. Such as whether to publicly post IP addresses for Proxies (government monitoring, versus giving the information to as many people as possible.) There were also arguments about whether people wanted to participate in running programs that cause official Iranian governmental sites to crash due to refreshing the page constantly from many computers worldwide. Some wanted to do it in order to keep propaganda from discouraging the dissenters. Others did not want to participate for fear of Iran shutting down the Internet completely. There were also people that changed their location to show that they were in Iran so when the government is monitoring, they will have to look through that many more users they’re trying to track. But that did hurt people who were looking at feeds that you could filter by location. I must admit, I did miss that ability when it was gone, it was great to see just the Tweets that were coming out of Iran from the few people who had Twitter access.

There is outrage at the American (and world) media being very quiet, especially on the television front. And there was news for a while about eleven journalists being detained. There is also outrage at the lack of media reporting in general. There are also complaints about the lack of action or the presence of action by countries whose representatives have spoken or have been silent about the events. The reports of deaths and injuries have been unclear, anywhere from 1-3 deaths and several hundred injuries. There are also rumors that 100 students went missing after raids conducted by either governmental militias or police on Tehran University after 3AM (local time) Sunday night. The Wikipedia page with Mousavi’s biography was change to say that he massacred people in the past, but it quickly got changed back.
A few days ago before the election, I read a blog somewhere that spoke about a girl walking down the street whose scarf fell of her hair because of the wind. The blogger observed her relishing in the few moments of freedom as she deliberately stalled placing it back on her head. To me, that was the moment I smelled the revolution coming. I’ve been also looking at linked photographs and the thing that caught my eye the most was the girls rebelliously showing a little hair as they marched. Some of the most powerful images were on Boston.com Boston.com’s photos have been the most popular, as were several Flickr sites. For videos, there is the one and only Youtube.com type in Iran and Sort by Newest to get the latest videos uploaded by Iranians (and others).

I first thought that I would wait until these events were over in order to post this, but I decided that it is important to share this information now so that more people can follow this revolution as it is being watched by the world. I suggest running over to Twitter right now and watching history unfold.

From a Tweeter not to  be named for safety:

“He ran a red light, he got a traffic ticket.” – Ahmadinejad on Mousavi house arrest.

NiJeL has been extremely busy at work with bringing a few projects to a close (more news on these soon!), starting up a few new projects (more news on these soon, too!), and traveling to the Middle East, which will be the subject of a future blog post. In short, the groups we’re doing amazing work, they were full of terrific people and they were very interested in what we’re doign here at NiJeL. Later on this week, I’ll have a full post describing our trip and as our projects get off the ground or go live, I’ll share that as well. Look for more from us here over the coming months.

I’d also like to introduce Layal Rabat, our newest intern here at NiJeL. Layal holds a B.S. in Pshchology from ASU and is currently working on a Master’s Degree in Social Justice and Human Rights at ASU West. Layal has a an extensive social media and grassroots campaign background, and is also fluent in Arabic and proficent in Spanish and Armenian. Among othere things, Layal will be posting to our blog occasionally, and she’s written a terrific first post about Twitter’s impact on the aftermath of the Iranian elections. Stay tuned – that post should come later today.

Welcome aboard, Layal!