iran-tw-20_biggerI watched the Iran Election chatter on Twitter for several hours last night. In a country with no free press and limited free speech it turns out that Twitter is a powerful tool of open communications. As the protesters used Twitter to rally and pass information about government activities, the government tried to block it and other social networking sites.

Hackers came to the rescue offering relay sites that would allow Iranians to access these sites through non-blocked addresses. Rumors swirled online of the government trying to track down Twitter users by
searching for their posts using the hashtag #iranelection. Twitter users all over the world were asked to make posts using #iranelection to flood the government monitors with false posters to chase.

Meanwhile, Twitter had scheduled a 90 minute window of downtime on Monday evening (US time). Actually their upstream ISP had scheduled the maintenance time, Twitter was just one of many customers affected.

Twitter users from all over the world started flooding Twitter and their ISP with pleas to postpone the maintenance because at that time they were one of the only non-government controlled sources of information and communications. (I doubt the founders of Twitter ever imagined this scenerio when they were started it in 2006.)

Finally, after receiving emails, Twitter posts, and phone calls from seemingly half of the internet users on Earth the guys at NTT America realized the scope of the situation and agreed to push back their maintenance 24 hours. This is the first case I’m aware of where a major ISP has rescheduled maintenance to support free speech in the Arab world.

What did I learn from all this? Not sure, it’s still a bit foggy, but I feel like I had a front row seat to history in the making last night. One thing I realized is that we Americans completely take our free speech and free press for granted. It’s hard to see the images of a modern Teran and imagine no free press.

I find it amazing that Twitter, which arguably is used for many petty and worthless conversations in my world, could be such a critical tool for people nine time zones away. The Twitter posts last night were coordiating protests, warning of police actions, linking to non-government sanctioned videos of what was really happening on the ground. It reminded me of the old World War II movies with the French resistance fighters vs the Germans. Except this was live.

I wonder if the internet may be the ultimate tool for opening closed governments? Governments who are used to controlling the press can’t control the intenet any more than the music industry was able to stop pirated music downloads. Nuclear weapons are old school, Twitter and Youtube may be the weapons that open Iran, China and others.