Twitter has enabled cyber civil unrest in Iran but is it free of the danger of being misused, asks MIS Asia online editor.
By Zafar Anjum
22 Jun 2009
If the Iraq war was about blogging (remember the Baghdad blogger?), the ongoing post-election protests in Iran are about Twitter.
If this is the moment of democracy, then this is also the moment of Twitter.
In the Teheran demonstrations against the contested re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Twitter has emerged as the tool to voice civil unrest. Iranian youth have been relaying their anguish through this popular micro-blogging site.
Twitter has become the opposition’s (led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, the moderate reform candidate who contends that the 12 June election was stolen from him) major tool for organising and sharing information with Iranians and the outside world.
“Some ask if the impact of technology (on the Iranian situation) is exaggerated,” writes Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal (22 June 2009). “No. Twittering and Youtubing made the story take hold and take off. But did the technology create the rebellion? No, it encouraged what was there…”
So, there you are.
This is not the first time that Twitter has been used as a platform of public outrage. Last year, protesters in Moldova used “Twitter as a rallying tool while outsiders peered at their tweets to help them understand what was happening in that little-known country.”
More recently, Amazon.com realised the power of Twitter after it received public backlash against its faux pas of reclassifying books with gay and lesbian themes as ‘adult’ and removing them from the main search and sales rankings.
In the case of Iranian protests, the global media has largely been supportive and appreciative of the use of Twitter. However, what is less reported is that this is not a one-way street.
Less benign use of Twitter
Computerworld (US) correspondent Jaikumar Vijayan has reported many of the non- benign use of Twitter in Iran. One of them is “its application in denial-of-service attacks against key government officials, including those affiliated with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”.
“Another tool that is available via Twitter is called bandwidth raep (bwraep), which is also a sort of DoS attack. This attack works by bombarding a Web server with fake requests to serve up content-heavy images.”
He further reports that tweets are also circulating that offer information on where to find malware capable of initiating so-called Ping and Syn flood attacks, which are designed to overwhelm servers with an incessant flood of useless requests.
Twitter as psyops?
Beyond this, there are many who question the whole Twitter phenomenon—branding it as psychological operations supported by spy agencies (CIA? Mossad? Iran government?).
For example, blogger Bob Morris (a US-based anti-war protestor) cites the case of a tweet about tanks entering Teheran. It turned out to be false. He thinks that this tweet was probably a disinformation campaign by the Iran government (to scare off the demonstrators).
Others allege that foreign “interests are engaged in an all out Twitter attack with hopes of delegitimising the Iranian election and causing political instability within Iran”.
Pak Alert Press alleges that most of the Iran-related tweets came from a handful of twitter accounts that were created on 13 June 2009 with the “exact same profile photo”, and most of their postings were in English. They had only a few friends but had thousands of followers.
I am not sure about most of the above information (I’ve not verified them) but I know one can “buy” thousands of friends on Twitter by paying the services of social networking marketing companies. Personally, I get spasm asking me if I was interested to buy thousands of Twitter followers.
Despite the brouhaha, the good thing for the protestors is that the Iranian government has not blocked the site.
While the Iran story is still developing, it would be interesting to see how cyber activists further use Twitter. One can only hope that a powerful social networking tool like Twitter remains firmly in the hands of the people and is used to strengthen democracy in the world.
Zafar Anjum is the online editor of MIS Asia portal.
