While post-election protests are underway in Iran, their government has reportedly blocked access to most media, including social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook. They’ve also cut off mobile phone service. But Twitter seems to have slipped through the cracks, and gotten the word out to the world with internet speed–at least for a time.
The L.A. Times tech blog tells us that people both inside and outside of Iran have been sending short text messages about the violence and civil disobedience that has engulfed the nation’s capital, Tehran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defended his reelection last week, but the protests have grown more intense.
Twitter traffic about the situation in Iran has been dominating the service for the last several days, with topics such as IranElection, Tehran and Iranians among the most actively discussed on Twitter. News tidbits, photos and chatter about the protests have flowed around the world, becoming a key medium for news from the scene.
As the New York Times reports: Iranians are coordinating their protests on Twitter…. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential election on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications.
Because of this, the company delayed a crucial maintenance operation, in order to accommodate the high volume of information flowing about the explosive election protests in Iran. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone noted that NTT America, the company that runs the servers that undergird the micromessaging site, recognized “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran” and was “taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide.” And according to Reuters, it was the U.S. State Department that encouraged them to do so.
Tags: Internet Speed, News
[...] our real-time messaging that a few days without service will cause us problems. While Twitter was the only service that could get news out from Iran after their election a few months ago, it seems cyber-bad-guys have found ways to silence other dissenters with internet [...]