[Reader-list] Twitter in Iran: genuine or orchestrated?

[Taha Mehmood]

http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=3923&mod=1&pg=1&sectionId=12&valid=true

Twitter in Iran: genuine or orchestrated?

“I narrowed it down to a handful of people who have accounted for
30,000 Iran related tweets in the past few days.” THE HOOT DESK looks
at web sources which suggest that the Twitter revolution in Iran is
manufactured outside. Pix: the defeated candidate.

Posted Saturday, Jun 20 01:46:28, 2009

We’ve been reading non-stop about how Twitter is lending itself to  a
popular uprising against the election results in Iran. The US media in
particular has been playing up the story and the State Department has
begun to do its bit to propagate this ‘revolution.’



“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 Iran
or people elsewhere who think President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should
have been defeated? Muslim Information Center, a Sri Lanka based NGO,
drew attention in the SouthAsian region to the results of some digging
into the Twitter ‘revolution’ published on the site called
chartingstocks.



“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 Iran elections. “The purpose of this guide is to help you
participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through
Twitter.”



One of the points in the guide:

“Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your
location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces
are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we
all become 'Iranians' it becomes much harder to find them.”



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?