If there is a revolution in Iran, it has a better chance of being televised than Twitterized.
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Twitter, the micro-blogging site famous for its text-message-sized posts, has been hailed as a powerful tool in current protests over the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 12’s vote.
Three weeks and a million tweets ago, it was exactly that tool. But now its importance has dwindled almost below the threshold of usefulness.
Meanwhile, pedestrian-taped video, most notably of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan [graphic video], who was shot in the chest during a protest June 20, has riveted the world on YouTube. And there’s a constantly updated Wiki article on Agha-Soltan and a battle to keep the article clear of misinformation.
Those are examples of the Internet as a battleground for change. Unfortunate that Twitter can’t contribute to that, and naysayers now have more nay to say.
On June 13, when the results of the election were announced, dissidents used Twitter to broadcast their anger over the outcome. Web-savvy Iranians opposed to Ahmadinejad turned to the relatively new medium because it could transmit information out of the country more freely than traditional blogging, email or SMS.
North Americans overwhelmingly switched to the site, too. Twitter was covering the Iranian unrest before CNN and most other media woke up to the news. In fact, #CNNfail, a topic describing the TV network’s failure to broadcast any news on Iran on June 13, was popular for days after the protests began.
But according to Toronto-based tech company Sysomos, only 8,600 Twitter users report Iran as their location in their profile. In a country of more than 70 million, it’s unreasonable to expect the site to spur mass political change.
The Iranians who are using Twitter are drowned out by the rest of the world. Try typing #iranelection into the Twitter search field today and thousands of tweets marked with that hashtag will come up. Messages of support, off-topic opinions, muddled diatribes and plain disinformation are crowding out valuable tweets. Sorting through them all is nearly impossible – and closer to impossible now that marketers (specifically pornographers) are deceptively using #iranelection to draw attention to their online business.
Twitter is no longer the protest-boosting platform it’s been made out to be. And, to this columnist’s chagrin, out-of-touch mainstream media types, those who pray for the demise of information-spreading technology that doesn’t directly employ them, are high-fiving in newsrooms everywhere.
It’s been a nagging criticism since its creation almost six years ago that Twitter is a tangle of unsorted, poorly sourced and mostly narcissistic nonsense.
At this point in the Iran protests, that description is sadly on point. Here’s hoping the site’s users can govern themselves more effectively in coming weeks.
joshuae@nowtoronto.com
