VOL. V NO. 14, June 19-July 02, 2009

Social Media Gaining Ground in Political Upheavals

In light of President Ahmadinejad's contested re-election on June 12, social media has become crucial to the spread of information within and outside of Iran – a country increasingly censored by the government's strong resentment of opposition voices, reports the Washington Post.

The news site explains, "Citizens who once had little public voice are using cheap Web tools to tell the world about the drama that has unfolded since [incumbent] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's disputed election."

Just as fax machines aided the Solidarity uprising in Poland in the 1980s, and cell phones bolstered support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004, Web 2.0 technology has the potential to play a similarly fundamental role in strengthening Iran's widespread and growing democratic movement, despite thorough censorship of traditional media outlets, writes Helle C. Dale of The Heritage Foundation.

While in her article she points out, "New media is, in its own way, as vulnerable as traditional media to government interference," John Palfrey, Bruce Etling and Robert Faris from the Washington Post counter that social media sites such as "Twitter [have] proven nearly impossible to block."

They recount, "Blogger Andrew Sullivan helped kick off the cyber hype with his June 13 post, 'The Revolution Will be Twittered?' in which he argued that the use of this platform means that 'you cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer.'"

Due to the clampdown on foreign and domestic media inside Iran, dissidents are relying on social networking Web sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and blogs to relay information about their experiences to a worldwide audience. Besides including links to pictures, videos and personal narratives, sites like Twitter also provide access to critical instructions on how to use proxies to avoid government censors.

Al-Arabiya writer Courtney C. Radsch noted that in addition to deflecting government trackers, people outside of Iran are instrumental in offering "their computers as proxies for use by Iranian activists." In this way, revolutionary activists can successfully navigate around government filters programmed to detect and block domestic servers and which miss those provided by outside sources.

Google also launched its Persian automatic translation service which, "Like YouTube and other services . . . is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa – increasing everyone's access to information," wrote Franz Och, principle scientist, on Google's Blog.

The people who do not seem to have access to on-the-ground information are journalists working for traditional media networks. As Brian Murphy reports for the Associated Press, Iran's clampdown on media "has been a test requiring editors and journalists to quickly decide what to pursue from the avalanche of rumors, tips and observations [found] on social networking sites."

Many major international news outlets now rely on phone calls, e-mails and Web chats to contact Iranian protesters and officials for information that bolsters the meager reports from their correspondents in Tehran, who remain cloistered in their offices per government rule.

While these "videos, pictures and news stories of the protests are being posted almost immediately by people in Iran and recycled by the mainstream media," Tania Tabar of Menassat notes that they are accompanied by disclaimers about the material. In fact, "it has become rare to see original footage from a major media outlet itself," she writes.

Unfortunately, while social media "are increasingly the only way for Iranians to reach the outside world, [. . .] their use of anonymity" to avoid repercussions makes their information difficult to verify, pointed out the head of the American bureau at Reporters Without Borders, Benoit Hervieu, in the Associated Press.

Odai Sirri, a Nanaimo businessman who has worked for news agencies in the Middle East, told Canada.com reporter Robert Barron that "relying on citizen journalists for information, particularly those who are active participants in the ongoing story, leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and mistakes." Moreover, she argues that there is "no way of holding people accountable if they spread false information."

Barron sheds light on another perspective, that of Alfred Hermida, a journalism professor at the University of British Columbia, who admits that while "There is a problem with journalistic standards when relying on citizen journalists for information, . . . the 'real value' of the people reporting from the streets" is the quality and diversity of the material to which Western media would have never been privy before the growth of the Internet.

In his opinion, traditional journalists are able to evaluate and piece together the images and stories they receive from their "amateur journalist colleagues" to create a much clearer picture of the events as they take place in Iran.

Despite these successes, Palfrey, Etling and Faris remind Washington Post readers that "there are sharp limits on what Twitter and other Web tools such as Facebook and blogs can do for citizens in authoritarian societies." Indeed, no amount of Twittering will force Iran's leaders to change their actions towards their citizens. Likewise, the writers posit that "If dissent is channeled into cyberspace, it can keep protesters off the streets and help state security forces track political activism and new online voices."

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