You can’t escape the news of the presidential election in Iran and what has arisen from it. But I am not going to discuss that here. What I want to talk about is the impact that social media service, particularly Twitter, have had in this election and how they have been used.
The Internet is a wonderful thing, it is not controlled by any one nation and is very very difficult to censor, just look at the difficulties the Chinese government has trying its best to censor the web.
The Iranian government pretty early on in this campaign tried very hard to block access to many sites, including the BBC, Facebook and Twitter among others, but by using proxy servers, some even provided by the US government, many Iranians have found ways around the blocks. But site blocking is something that Iranians are used to as Iran blocks more Internet sites than any other nation, bar China.
Interestingly the software that Iran uses to block access to many Iranian sites is Secure Computing’s, SmartFilter. Secure Computing is an American company and under US law they are forbidden from having any dealings with the Iranian government. Turns out that the Iranian government use a pirated copy, where they got it from who knows but the US government and Secure Computing are both trying very hard to stop Iran from using it.
On Facebook the main opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousav, had a very good coordinated campaign going on to rally support for him, in fact he had over 6000 supporters. Now don’t take that as an endorsement of his candidacy, remember I don’t do politics.
During the election Twitter became a very important tool, allowing Iranians all over the country to swap proxy server details, and basically coordinate a campaign at grassroots. They used a few key hashtags, #IranElection, #iranvote and #gr88 to get their messages across. Realising the importance that Twitter has had on this election, the US State Department asked Twitter to delay a scheduled service upgrade that would have potentially cut off access to Twitter during the Iranian daytime.
Now I have been keeping an eye on these feeds, and to start off with most of the messages are from Mr Mousav’s supporters, so I am not under an illusion that these feeds truly represent the will of the Iranian nation, but what has fascinated me is the battle that has going on in these feeds for the past couple of days.
So what has this battle been about, well the Iranian security services have been trying to use biographical data on Twitter to try and find details of users on Iran, and have been contacting those that they can find and telling them to stop, so a campaign has started to try and get as many Twitter users as possible to change their details to living in Tehran and their time zone to be GMT +3:30, hoping that the Iranian security services will be overwhelmed, and unable to find genuine Iranian bloggers.
Originally Twitter was a great place for proxy server details and many servers details have been shared, but as they are on open channels the Iranian Security Services have been able to block these as well. So people are being encouraged to use direct messaging to trusted Tweeters instead of ReTweets.
Now things have stepped up a level and Twitter is being used to coordinate distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on Iranian government web servers. Not the best idea in the world as it also affects the network with normal Iranians need to do everyday things.
So the Security Services are now striking back, setting up their own Twitter accounts and turning these tactics on the opposition, there have been many false rumours planted by Security Service personnel, usually quite inflammatory, such as Mr Mousav has been assassinated, or the army are bringing tanks into the the area where protests are taking place. They put these rumours out there in order to try and let them filter down to the protesters and cause them to get a bit hyped up and give them an excuse to get tough.
I am seeing a war of attrition really, as the protesters and their supporters find new ways of communicating and hitting back at the government, the Security Services get more and more clever about countering these moves. Some new accounts have suddenly appeared on Twitter, all appearing to be accounts of people who would never in a million years be members of the Iranian Security Services, such as an American Gay Punk Rocker, and these accounts have been suggesting new targets for the DDOS, which just happen to turn out to be proxy servers used by the protesters or opposition websites.
Now the most disturbing tactic I have seen is the contacting of overt Bahá’ís on Twitter and appealing to their concern over the treatment of their fellow Bahá’ís in Iran and trying to get us to spread this information, I have been contacted myself and I can honestly say its a bit below the belt. Now Bahá’ís in Iran are treated rather badly by the government, with over 200 having been executed or mysteriously disappeared since 1979, but now they are trying to drag us into this mess.
Now I do not support the candidacy of any of the men standing to become Iranian president, because like all other Bahá’ís, I don’t do politics, and we are not going to overtly campaign or show preference for any candidate as we like to do things in a non-partisan manor.
The problem is with this tactic is that some other Bahá’ís may get caught up in all the excitement and may fulfil the wishes of the Iranian Security Services, giving them a reason to crack down on the already heavily persecuted Bahá’ís of Iran. So I importune to all Bahá’ís out there on Twitter, don’t get involved, you may be doing more harm than good.
Anyway I will keep an eye and see how events progress and what effect Twitter has on them.
God Bless
Michael
