Thursday 18 June 2009

US Enlists Twitter in Iranian Standoff


IslamOnline.net & Newspapers

CAIRO — The US administration has delved into Iran’s election dispute by asking the micro-blogging website Twitter to delay maintenance shutdown to avoid disrupting communications among tech-savvy Iranian activists.

"This was just a call to say: 'It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?'" P.J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs, told the New York Times on Wednesday, June 17.

State Department official Jared Cohen e-mailed the social-networking site with the unusual request to delay its scheduled maintenance shutdown because of its use as a communications tool by Iranian activists who stage nonstop protests.

Twitter noted the State Department's request in a blog post and said that it put off the move until late Tuesday afternoon — 1:30 a.m. Wednesday in Tehran.

"It's humbling to think that our two-year old company could be playing such a globally meaningful role that State officials find their way toward highlighting our significance."

The move came despite an assurance by President Barack Obama on Tuesday, June 16, that his administration would not interfere in the Iranian poll dispute.

"It is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as ... meddling in Iranian elections."

But the State Department insisted that their Twitter request did not amount to meddling.

"This is completely consistent with our national policy," Crowley said.

"We are proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression."

Incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been declared the winner of Friday’s presidential vote, with results showing him winning almost 63 percent of the vote against 34 percent for his main reformist rival Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

But Mousavi is refusing to acknowledge the re-election of Ahmadinejad for a second four-year term and is leading his supporters in street protests.

Some 1.5 to two million pro-Mousavi demonstrators swarmed to the streets over the past days in the biggest outpouring of public anger since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Twitting Iranians

A White House official said that social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook have become a focal point for young, urban Iranians to speak their mind out.

"Twitter is simply a medium that all Iranians can use to communicate," he told the Washington Post.

The official suggested that even Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a Twitter user.

According to reports, supporters of Mousavi posted defiant messages on Twitter on Tuesday, calling for a second banned rally to go ahead and offering security updates.

Mousavi has almost 48,000 supporters on his Facebook page, and Ahmadinejad also has a page with 2,615 fans.

More than 23 million Iranians in a country of 70 million -- more than 60 percent of whom are under the age of 20 -- have access to the Internet.

In a 2007 report on Iran, the OpenNet Initiative estimated there were about 400,000 blogs in Farsi.

Twitter officials insisted their decision to delay the outage was not made upon the government request, but rather to help Iranians get out the word.

"We did so because events in Iran were tied directly to the growing significance of Twitter as an important communication and information network," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Some, however, doubt how much twittering is actually going on inside Iran, as the Twitter interface does not support Farsi.

The tweets circulated by Iranian expatriates in the US tend to be in English. And though people may be sending tweets out of Iran, their use inside Iran may be low.

"Twitter's impact inside Iran is zero," maintains Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles.

"Here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look…you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves."

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