Twitter in Iran: genuine or orchestrated?
We’ve been reading non-stop about how Twitter is lending itself to a popular uprising against the election results in
"Twitter delays maintenance amid online revolution" said an AFP story. It went on to say "The Obama administration took the unusual step of asking Twitter to delay a planned maintenance outage because of the social blogging site¿s use as a communications tool by Iranians following their disputed election, a senior official said Tuesday.
The request highlighted the administration¿s Web-savvy ways and the power of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in organizing protests over the election results in the face of a ban by Iranian authorities on other media."
The power of social networks in organizing protests is good stuff to highlight, but who exactly is organizing the protests? People in
"Were these legitimate Iranian people or the works of a propaganda machine? I became curious and decided to investigate the origins of the information. In doing so, I narrowed it down to a handful of people who have accounted for 30,000 Iran related tweets in the past few days. Each of them had some striking similarities -
1. They each created their twitter accounts on Saturday June 13th.
2. Each had extremely high number of Tweets since creating their profiles.
3. "IranElection" was each of their most popular keyword
4. With some very small exceptions, each were posting in ENGLISH.
5. Half of them had the exact same profile photo
6. Each had thousands of followers, with only a few friends. Most of their friends were EACH OTHER.
Why were these tweets in English? Why were all of these profiles OBSESSED with Iran? It became obvious that this was the work of a team of people with an interest in destabilizing Iran. The profiles are phonies and were created with the sole intention of destabilizing Iran and effecting public opinion as to the legitimacy of Iran’s election.
I narrowed the spammers down to three of the most persistent – @StopAhmadi @IranRiggedElect @Change_For_ Iran
I decided to do a google search for 2 of the 3 – @StopAhmadi and @IranRiggedElect. The first page to come up was JPost (Jerusalem Post) which is a right wing newspaper pro-Israeli newspaper.
JPost actually ran a story about 3 people "who joined the social network mere hours ago have already amassed thousands of followers." Why would a news organization post a story about 3 people who JUST JOINED TWITTER hours earlier? Is that newsworthy? Jpost was the first (and only to my knowledge) major news source that mentioned these 3 spammers.
The fact that JPost promoted these three Twitterers who went on the be the source of the IranElection Twitter bombardment is, unfortunately, evidence that this was an Israeli propaganda campaign against Iran. I must admit that I had my suspiscions. After all, Que Bono? (latin for "Who Benefits). There’s no question that Israel perceives Iran as an enemy, more so than any other nation. Destabilizing the country would benefit them."
Meanwhile the site called BoingBoing.net published a cyberwar guide to the
One of the points in the guide:
"Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is
The point is, if all sorts of people are becoming Iranians, how do we know how many Iranians are genuinely protesting the election results through Twitter?