First-Hand (Iran) Story: How Twitter is Changing Broadcasting

The Latest from Iran: Demonstrations and An Appeal to the Guardian Council (15 June)

I just came off-air from an interview with the BBC World Service and thought I would share the following:

0907 GMT: News comes via BreakingNews on Twitter, picking up on Iranian state media, that "IRANIAN SUPREME LEADER ORDERS INVESTIGATION INTO ALLEGATIONS OF ELECTION FRAUD". Later "tweets" relay Iranian state media that Ayatollah Khameni met with Presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi before making the announcement.

0923 GMT: Enduring America posts update on Khamenei's meeting with Mousavi and the order for the enquiry.

0930 GMT: I tell the BBC World Service producer of Khamenei's order. He is unaware of the development.

0934 GMT: The BBC World Service, drawing from Associated Press Online, announces --- in the middle of an interview with Dr Ali Ansari on the Iranian internal situation --- that Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered an investigation of electoral fraud.

0937 GMT: I go on-air to talk about the US response to developments in Iran.

Comments

[Jonny]

I still don't get the importance of Twitter!! Didn't you just say that the BBC producer used the info once he got it (or waited to check it?) from the AP?

Broadcasting is changed when the producer announces something from Twitter, or when a great many more people than half a mIllion get info from it.

Rather than twitter changing broadcasting, how about twitter providing broadcast journalists with possible sources for stories, that then need to be verified?

[Mike Dunn]

Jonny- In my opinion Twitter is one of those things that's difficult to 'get' until you actually use it. Personally I find the amount of information that's often not reported in the wider press hugely valuable (as much for what's happening in my local area as for what's happening in Iran)- I think it's just a case of following the right people for your interests.

I think Scott's point is that http://twitter.com/BreakingNews" rel="nofollow">BNO News' reporting of the AFP/AP wire was a good 30 minutes ahead of the World Service's- and being 30 minutes ahead of the curve with some pretty game-changing news is quite significant these days.

[Canuckistan]

I agree Twitter is a great resource for breaking news. However, I also find it problematic when (not on this blog) tweets are accepted as the gospel truth. There is no way of verifying some of what these are saying about the situation in Iran. One might be a message from someone at the U of Tehran; another reporting from Iran may actually be from a teenager in Utah. Rumours earlier about guns positioned in the square where the Mousavi protesters were to gather may have been from a concerned protester; they may also have been from the Iranian government in an effort to discourage protesters from going to the square. In other words, some tweets require more scepticism than they often get.

[Jonny]

Haha methinks I've had this conversation before..

Anyway, I think my point is more like Canukistan's

I'm not denying the wealth of breaking info it can provide. But I don't see what the point of that is.

Anyway, firstly, to be facetious all this is a product of instant posting tech - one could say it's really SMS that's the 'broadcasting revolution', or internet forums, or netbooks. So, if it is tech we need to be VERY careful because this automatically means huge swathes (actually, the vast majority) are entirely disenfranchised from the info. So, it still needs to then be verified then reported. So, we're back to what we had.

Then there is the verification problem which C has covered.

But, the 'fact checking' problem isn't actually that much of a problem, because why I really don't get is, well, why do you need to know what is happening in 15 words RIGHT NOW? I mean, if you live in Iran, or wherever, fair enough, but what can we possibly do with that info here? The way we understand events, and analyze them, isn't from the immediate info as that's just noise. We need to filter that noise into something we understand.

I wish I could express this better, but I think what I am trying to say is that Twitter and other instant sources of info lessen our understanding because they provide too much random noise rather than real information. Who defines the 'best' info is not the issue because we do that as communities within public discourses by taking time over issues, not jumping at the most recent stuff. In effect it can never be useful beyond being a potential vague starting point, that's my point. It;s electronic chinese whispers as far as I can tell.

Oh, and something else, in my opinion the evolution of all this is just like the evolution of earlier media. In what way is twitter, really, any different than the old telegraph wires, and the original versions of internet traffic? As far as I can tell very soon twitter will evolve into, I dunno "Twitter by google" or "Microsoft, instant world" or something, and then it's the same as everything else. The interesting question for me is who will be Twitter/Facebook/Bebo/MySpace's William Randolph Hearst. It will happen, I promise. I'm a Marxist.

[Mike Dunn]

I think you're both right re the reliability of information on Twitter. Something that both critics of it and people who favour it (like me) need to remember is that tweets 'on the ground' are eye-witness accounts- some are accurate and well-considered, while others are absolute rubbish (and some are outright lies). But with a bit of effort the noise can be filtered to something more manageable and reliable- not only with search tools, but through 'networks of trust' and all that business.

Which leads to the 'immediacy' issue. We do need to take our time over issues, but our thinking still needs to come from somewhere- why not use tweets from Iran that you think have value alongside everything else? (I also wonder where we'd stop if it were possible to roll back Twitter, SMS et al- why have TV news when you can have newspapers? Why have newspapers when you can have a guy on a horse bringing the news to the town square..?)

Lastly, Twitter's not just useful for immediate, 'I was at the demo and I saw this happen...' type info. There's also plenty of 'Here's a really good NYT article I think you should read...' and 'Here's a blog post from an expert who fact-checked that article' etc. If you follow the right people for your interests then it offers alternatives to what you normally hear elsewhere- sometimes from people on the scene, sometimes from obscure bloggers, sometimes just from something you missed in the press. I'd argue that with a bit of thought it's possible to turn what is admittedly an absolute tidal wave of miscellaneous information into something more useful.

[Jonny]

The problem I have, as I have said before, is not that you can't get info on it, you can! But so far I have seen zero evidence that the info is new, or different (or useful), and therefore anything really do do with twitter. If anything by providing snippets of info Twitter contributes less to our understanding.

My point is that it might be good for an article you missed, or a gig happening, or such basic info, or as you say useful alternatives, but that info is available elsewhere, so Twitter is a moot point. I have a major problem when people starting giving it political or Historical agency just because they use it whilst ignoring that a tiny, tiny number of people actually know (or care) about it.

People procaliming the effect of twitter, as far as I can tell, are caught in a 'post hoc ergo proper hoc' problem of causation, and creating a self-perpetating ( or, self-fulfilling) importance for twitter.

This is something I got from a comment from Columbia Journalism review about the last 'twitter revolution' in Moldova and I think it's right...

"BOB GARFIELD: Can you start by laying out for us what were the first indications that this mass of protestors in Moldova had been organized?

ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Well, what we saw in Moldova was a lot of discussion in blogs, on Facebook, lots of different social media, with youth, particularly youth on the left, very upset, believing that the elections were rigged. And then we saw street protests with more than 10,000 people out on the streets of Chisinau a week ago Tuesday. And people very, very quickly made a link between social media and the actual manifestations in the streets.

Near as we can tell, the first to the scene was The Telegraph in the U.K. with a story linking Twitter as a causal factor in all of this. And then there was a thoughtful, although perhaps a little breathless, post from my friend Evgeny Morozov on a very influential blog called Net Effect, which declared this the “Twitter Revolution.”

And then from the press standpoint of this, we were off to the races. It showed up in The New York Times the next day as the “Twitter Revolution,” and that meme propagated in a lot of different directions.

GARFIELD: Now, one thing you discovered as you looked at the data is that most of the tweets emanated not from the scene of the protest but elsewhere, because there aren’t many Twitter subscribers in Moldova. But, of course, that doesn’t mean that Twitter wasn’t a catalyst in one what happened. How big a part did it play?

ZUCKERMAN: My take on it at this point is that Twitter probably wasn’t all that important in organizing the demonstrations. Where I think they were enormously important is helping people, particularly people in the Moldovan Diaspora, keep up with the events in real time.

One thing to keep in mind is that Moldova has a huge population living abroad - it’s more than 25 percent of the country - and they were really attached to Twitter as a source of information. Roughly a quarter of all of the messages posted on Tuesday, the day of the actual demonstrations, were what we call re-tweets. It’s basically saying, hey, I’m quoting this speaker who said the following. And mostly those re-tweets were reports from people who either were in the square or had news from the square.

What you saw on that Tuesday was really people trying to find ways to sort of spontaneously organize a newsroom. By Wednesday, a lot of what seems to be going on in the Twittering is a sort of self-congratulatory, hey, we just held a revolution over Twitter – isn’t this exciting? Twitter will change the world"