Friday
Jan082010
UPDATED Iran & Twitter 101: Getting The Facts Right --- A Response to Will Heaven
Friday, January 8, 2010 at 11:06 
UPDATE 8 January: Will Heaven will not give up --- he has made another attempt, informed only by anecdote, distortion, and speculation, to justify his campaign for silence on Twitter about #IranElection.I will break my own vow of silence (see comments below), regarding any discussion of and thus further publicity for the thoughtless and indefensible in Mr Heaven's "analysis", to say this:
@WillHeaven: You insult those of us who use #Twitter wisely and, hopefully, effectively. You insult @persiankiwi, & you insult the people of #Iran. If you have any decency, stop.
(P.S. Maybe you can be of use writing about #uksnow.)
---
Josh Shahryar writes:
Waking up every day and being a journalist is a very conflicting job. Sometimes, you read the work of other journalists who’ve written responsibly and with full knowledge of the subject matter and you feel proud of who you are. Other times, people write things that make you want to just sit there and mourn the fact that he or she belongs to the same profession as you.
Last week, in the online edition of Britain's Daily Telegraph, Will Heaven critiqued the people who have been active on Twitter for the cause of Iran --- some now for almost 200 days --- under the headline, “Iran and Twitter: the fatal folly of the online revolutionaries”.
Don’t get me wrong, Mr Heaven has freedom of speech on his side. But every now and then, I take the liberty to use the same right to point out where fellow journalists for filling the internet with assertions that misrepresent the truth and "analysis" that blatantly insults not only our intelligence but also our characters. I think Will Heaven fits that bill quite neatly.
I am simply going to reply to Mr Heaven's paragraphs one by one in order. I have not changed any of his words, and I will address him directly.
HEAVEN: As young men and women took to the streets of Tehran on Sunday to confront the Revolutionary Guard, another very different protest sprang to life all over the world. This one didn't face tear-gas or gunfire. And its participants didn't risk prison, torture or death. It took place on 2009's most trendy website: Twitter.com.
Well, now, how about the risk of having your family imprisoned, tortured or killed? Did you know that dozens of social media activists have families in Iran and dozens more have received e-mails from the Iranian government telling them to stop or else their families would face serious harm? Did you know that Fereshteh Ghazi (@iranbaan), another activist who writes about prisoners, has family in Iran? Did you know that Isa Saharkhiz, the father of the most active of the Twitterati, Mehdi Saharkhiz (@onlymehdi), is in prison and being tried in connection with the protests?
I think everyone would agree that even if these people aren’t personally facing imprisonment, torture and death, they might deserve a moment of recognition for persisting in their reporting when their families facing the same peril. If you don't choose to join recognition of them, at least pause and include these facts before you wag your finger at their supposed security.
For Twitter enthusiasts, this has been a bumper year. With a new online tool at their chubby fingertips, they've helped to change the world. Or at least, that's what they think: the so-called Iranian Twitter Revolution recently won a Webby award for being "one of the top 10 internet moments of the decade".”
Chubby fingertips? Nice use of the stereotype that portrays all geeks as being overweight. This here is just a direct and far from original insult. I’m not sure how you manage to call yourself a journalist and use such degrading language to get your fictitious points across.
As for the Iranian "Twitter Revolution", that is a creation of the mainstream media who are ignorant of what is going on inside and outside Iran.
If the protests in Iran are turning into a revolution, social networking websites had very little to do with it. The reason why the site are getting kudos is because they helped people bypass the failure of the mainstream media to cover the events in Iran and get informed about what was really happening on the streets of Tehran as well as shore up outside support for the cause.
Get this straight; it was the failure to provide timely and accurate news regarding the events in Iran that forced the citizens of the world to step up and help educate people about the courage and perseverance of the Iranian people and the brutality and inhumanity of the Iranian government. You can whine all you want, but you, if you are representing a responsible "traditional" media vs. a supposedly tangential and irresponsible social media, have failed. And the fact that you failed does not give you the right to attempt and devalue the work of others.
Let me tell you why I find that deeply troubling. There has been no revolution in Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has held on to power after a rigged election. Meanwhile, protests continue to be violently suppressed by government forces and unregulated militias, with human rights groups saying that at least 400 demonstrators have been killed since June. Dozens of those arrested remain unaccounted for, and many of those set free tell of rape and vicious beatings in Iran's most notorious prisons.
So don't tell me that Twitter and other online networks have improved the situation in Iran. It's deluded to think that "hashtags", "Tweets" and "Twibbons" have threatened the regime for a second. If all the internet could muster in a decade was smug armchair activists and pontificating techies, we may as well all log off in the New Year.
Again, Twitter has not improved the situation in Iran; it has improved the flow of news about that situation to the outside world. It has helped mobilize activists outside Iran, protesting across the world, to pressure the international community into taking action against the Iranian government.
If you had followed the news or understood what you have read, you would have known about the 25 July protests where thousands of people gathered in more than 100 cities around the globe in support of the Iranian people’s struggle for human rights. There have been dozens of protests in dozens of other cities since then; I attended one just a week ago. These protests have served to both inform the public and to pressure governments to deal with Iran’s repression of its citizens more harshly then they might have otherwise would have.
This would not have been possible if social networking websites had not connected people and informed them about what was going on inside Iran since, frankly, I see the mainstream media's primary interest in Iran as the nuclear energy program.
Your ignorance does not change the facts on the ground.
Here's the other thing "social media experts" will forget to tell you: dictatorships across the world now use their own tools to hunt down online protesters. In Iran, for instance, the government controls the internet with a nationalised communications company. Using a state-of-the-art method called "Deep Packet Inspection", data packages sent between protesters are now automatically broken down, checked for keywords, and reconstructed within milliseconds. Every Tweet and Facebook message, in other words, is firmly on the regime's radar.
As a result, the crackdown in Iran has been easier than ever before. Once the Revolutionary Guard intercept a suspect message, they are able to pinpoint the location of a guilty protester using their computer's IP address. Then it's just a question of knocking on doors – and confiscating laptops and PCs for hard evidence.
Sadly, when this happens, those outside Iran cannot always absolve themselves of responsibility. If you're an internet user in Britain who communicates with an Iranian protester online, or encourages them to send anti-regime messages over the internet, you could be putting their life in danger.
Here’s a bit of education in anti-filtering software. There’s a software called Tor –-- similar to Freegate --- that allows people to connect to the internet without fear of Deep Pocket Inspection tools. You can figure out that someone is using Tor with DPI, but you can never find out what they’re sending. Our "chubby-fingered" friends were intelligent and passionate enough to get that into Iranian hands as early as June. And that’s not all. Net activists have already created several new anti-DPI softwares that have already reached Iranians and are being skillfully used by a select few to get information out. With these, the government can’t even figure out if someone is using anti-filtering software or is connected straight up.
If this had not occurred, you would not get all the videos, pictures and information readily available within minutes of protests in Iran.
Just because you do not know about these things does not mean they do not exist or they do not work.
And contrary to what you claim, no one actually has to encourage Iranians to communicate information about their country to the outside world. They do it themselves. They feel a need to help the world understand what is going on in their country and not have to read fear-mongering articles on the mainstream media about how Iran is going to bomb Israel and there would be World War III and such. What the techies have done is help them access the software that allows them to do it without fear of getting arrested.
There's nothing wrong with spreading awareness outside Iran, but it's horribly naive to think that supporting illegal activity in a foreign country has no ethical dimension. It's equally foolish, of course, to kid yourself that you're on the front line.
For the Iranian authorities, the detective work often doesn't have to be remotely hi-tech. As Evgeny Morozov recently noted, it is now possible to calculate a person's sexual orientation by analysing who their Facebook friends are. Sure, it's a quirky news story in Britain, but terrifying for gay people living in countries such as Iran, where homosexuality is outlawed.
Illegal activity? What illegal activity? Iranians are granted the right to take to streets and peacefully protest by the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just because the government is overstepping Iranian law does not mean you have to go out of your way to accommodate their will to hammer home your fallacious arguments. As for your assertion that helping Iranians spread the word about the situation is wrong, well, maybe you should know that freedom of expression is a universal human right. No country’s laws can infringe upon that. None.
I’m not sure you know that Facebook and Twitter are officially banned in Iran right now. People in Iran who are using the two applications have created accounts specifically to disseminate news and information, not for dating. Even if the government finds those accounts, it will not be able to trace them back to their owners because of new software.
Perhaps Barack Obama was one of the first world leaders to realise that social media have their limits. In March, on the feast of Nowruz (the Farsi New Year), he posted an online video in which he addressed the Iranian people and their leaders directly.
It signaled the launch of "YouTube diplomacy", one commentator gushed. But, like the Twitter Revolution, it has achieved very little – Iran remains determined to become a nuclear power, and America is still described by the regime as "the Great Satan".
The jab at YouTube diplomacy is another creation of those in the media who know little about what is going on during protests on the streets in daylight, even with video evidence at hand, but who are more than ready to scare the hell out of everyone by proclaiming that Iran will get the ability to make a nuclear bomb soon. Your own retreat into that nuclear shelter, under cover of the ludicrous and unfounded accusations about the movement inside as well as outside Iran, is only an addition to that evasion.
So what can we do? Well, perhaps that’s a question for 2010, because the internet, combined with “offline” networks, probably can encourage openness in dictatorships. But before we work out how, let’s first drop the self-congratulation.
What can you do? You can actually report after researching the subject you are about to write on. You can find sources inside Iran to get some real news out. And you can stop hurling insults like poisoned candy.
Finally, we don’t need to self-congratulate ourselves. The media does it for us quite neatly. I will point you to just one article about the Twitter Revolution published a few days ago in one of Sweden’s largest tabloid newspapers, Expressen:
Today Mousavi's Facebook page [a page run by activists from outside Iran] is a more secure source of news than Al-Jazeera and the BBC, while micro-blogs and websites like the dailyniteowl.com and rahesabz.net [both websites that use direct information from tweets and Facebook] offer sympathizers as well as media consumers, fast, reliable news [about Iran] that traditional newsrooms cannot provide.
That is just one out of hundreds of articles that have been published about the worldwide effort to help get the reality on Iran’s streets to people around the globe through social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and through microblogs.
I understand your frustration at having to keep up with citizen reporting. But that does not give you the right to so flagrantly distort facts and insult a mass of people that have devoted their own time without any monetary compensation to helping their brothers and sisters in Iran.
Next time, if you’re going to write on this subject, please, inform yourself about the many terms you used and try to show the real picture.
Reader Comments (42)
Here..here Scott.
Will,
I'll let you know what I think in my next response.
This has gotten to the point of absurdity. Will Heaven clearly doesn't understand what he is talking about in the least. To suggest that the people who follow #IranElection and help spread the word that clearly the people in Iran who are putting their lives at risk WANT them to spread, is truly mind-boggling. They are fighting for their freedom, and we are supposed to ignore them. Why? To keep them safe? Preposterous and unbelievable logic.
Will, how many people do you know or talk to that are INSIDE Iran? I would bet none. Some of us on the outside do have means of communicating with people inside the country. My own sources express nothing but gratitude for the fact that we in the diaspora are making sure that the effort they put into getting the information to us is not wasted. I can speak first hand about this. I know for a fact that major international media outlets follow some of us on #IranElection very closely because we have proven ourselves to be reliable funnels of first hand information coming out of Iran.
This is CRITICAL to Iranians inside Iran. The regime would love nothing more than to prevent the videos and reports from coming out of the country. This is because they know that a feedback loop has formed between the protesters on the inside, the community on the outside, and the vast majority of Iranians on the inside who get a lot of information from satellite feeds. In effect, the people in the west using Twitter, Facebook and other social media to spread the word are acting as cohesion amplifiers for the movement.
Will, you clearly are getting some kind of jolly joy from the attention. This is becoming a circus. Truly, for the sake of your own fledgling reputation, you should stop. But I'm pretty sure you won't.
I love how Iran was overtaken by Twitter. It just goes to show how nothing can stop free speech and people trying to overthrow a bad government.
John R. Carlisle
@Will Heaven
"I do feel, by the way, the Josh has TOTALLY missed the point of my argument."
Some years ago I heard a story of a mother who went to her son's Scouts parade. She said to her friend "Everyone is out of step except my wee Johnnie"
It would appear from all the comments on here and on The Daily NiteOwl Blog, that everyone who has made comment has missed the point of your argument.
That would suggest to me that everyone is out of step except Mr Heaven . . . .
Iran News Now:
Your sources inside are telling you exactly the same as my sources are telling me - and I would assume they are not the same! I know for a fact that many people do not log unto the sites, but they check them - they knew all about the "I am Majid" Campaign and they were so grateful. Such a shame that Mr Heaven did not quote some of those things in his article in the Daily Telegraph.
Apologies to everyone for coming back a third time.
Mr Heaven please read this article - especially the last two paragraphs, and then tell us that you are still convinced that you are right:
http://www.iranian.com/main/2010/jan/bloody-sunday
Roe Lassie has reminded me of a very good point. Many "Heavenites," as I'll call them, insist that less than 1% of Iranians "are on Twitter" and therefore it's all a waste of time to try to tweet Iranian news or talk about Iran on Twitter, because Iranians can't see any of it. There are a number of flaws with this theory.
First of all, since Twitter is blocked in Iran, the only people showing up with Iranian IP addresses on Twitter would be people tweeting from embassies and the IRI itself! Both Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, being above the law, tweet all the time.
Real Iranians could only even GET to Twitter by using a proxy, so of course they would not show up as Iranian IP addresses. There are estimated to be 20 million Iranian internet users, but if they use Tor or Haystack they will show up as a random assortment of 20 million IPs from various free countries where the proxy servers are located. There's no reason why these users couldn't Tweet if they wanted to.
Another flaw with the Heavenite argument: anyone can LOOK at #IranElection without endangering themselves at all. You don't have to go to Twitter.com, the feed is mirrored on several other pages. You don't even need the internet, you can read Twitter from a cell phone. That's what makes it special. That's why you only get 140 characters. Since 60% of Iranians have cell phones, I think it's impossible to say how many of them might read twitter feeds.
Someone once tweeted that their contacts in Iran said they check the Twitter feed once in a while to see if anybody is still supporting them, and they feel good when they see that we're still there tweeting about them. That's good enough for me!
Hi Will,
Only 1 question matters: What do Iranians (risking & giving their lives 4 freedom) want outside world 2 do?
Do they want us to hear their cries of pain, Courage & FREEDOM? Or ignore them?
It is clear they appreciate the moral support, Solidarity & getting the word out to the world.
Quoting @persiankiwi: “thank you ppls 4 supporting Sea of Green – pls remember always our martyrs – Allah Akbar”
@jhod
Will Heaven,
It is unfortunate that you have chosen to ride on backs of Iranians to advance your otherwise lackluster career. You have managed to become the story. That is shameful.
The point you miss is the fact that Iranians struggle to break the back of their fascist regime is not a 2009 struggle. It is a struggle that started long before the age of Twitter, Facebook, and before the invention of Internet. Where were you in the 80’s when thousands of Iranians were executed by Islamic Fascist Republic who were not using Twitter. I guess you could not know that because you were in dipper in the 80’s, were you not?
Please allow me to enlighten you; in Iran you do not need to Twitt to be beaten, arrested, raped, tortured, ran-over by police car and executed. All you have to do is to live in Iran. I suggest you try that to prove me wrong.
You are very green but not Iranian Green. You are much too green behind the ears. Some readers suggested you need to grow up professionally. I suggest you need a lot more but you can start by reading a lot about Iran and Iranians, live the life Iranians live; study in Iran, work in Iran, walk streets of Iran and only then you may be qualified to measure success/failure of Green Democracy Movement and communication tools they use. Are you able to live a life of an Iranian? If not, please take your bleeding heart and GO AWAY. We do not need a neophyte journalist to write about us and assess risk we face using Twitter. Please GO AWAY and find other victims to making your living with. Please Go Away we have enough Basiji and enough fascist thug to deal with. You are much too insignificant at this time.
Signed: A Proud Iranian Mohareb
Whenever I see something like that will heaven I think of two things. One is what a condescending asshole. Second, who care's what this condescending asshole thinks.and go back to writing your avatar rants!
Megan
I love your signature ! I am a Mohareb also !
Will, just in case you still don't understand,
This is what we, on Twitter and other networks, are doing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2czb8_VC4Ms (Reza Aslan speech at the Global Day of Action for Iran- July 25 at UCLA)
"when the world watches what's happening in Iran, the regime kills fewer of us ... the regime kills fewer of us when the world is watching"
We are watching, and making sure the regime knows we are watching. We are also supporting, every way we can, not instigating, there is a world of difference between those 2 words, the people of Iran know what they want, they don't need us to tell them what to do.
May I also remind you that it is people in Iran who themselves took the initiative of using Twitter and other networks to let the world know what was going on in the country and to ask for support? Do I have to copy and paste here all the statements from Mousavi, Zahra Rahnavard, Karroubi, and many many others asking for world support? Do I have to post all the speeches from people like Ahmad Batebi, Amir Fakhravar, and many others, who had to leave Iran and are doing all they can to raise awareness about the nature of Iran's government? What they ask for is not an armed operation, they ask us to watch and support, this is what we do, and this is what, for the most part, "official" medias have failed to do.
Your article is an insult to our intelligence, the people I have met on Twitter and Facebook who are actively supporting protesters in iran are the most amazing group I have ever been around, the most intelligent and generous people all reunited for the same cause; free Iran from a repressive and cruel government: the islamic regime, a government who, despite its name, has nothing to do with religion.
We all know very well we are not the ones on the front lines, we know we are not the ones risking our lives in the streets of Iran, however we are at one with them, our thoughts are with them, and I know that I for one, never, ever, forget, even for one moment, that our friends, brothers, and sisters in Iran are risking their lives every step of the way to freedom, and if you think we don't realise that then I suggest you think again.
And to all of you friends, brothers, sisters in Iran, we love you. God bless you all.
Anna
my thoughts on @willheaven~It is better to remain silent and be THOUGHT a FOOL, than to open your mouth and remove ALL doubt
"Will Heaven says:
8 January 2010 at 11:23
@NightOwl. That’s convenient. And a great effort from Scott Lucas to avoid the debate simply by trying to discredit me. Let me be really clear: Your work is putting Iranian lives in danger for your own self-congratulation. If that insults you, then so be it."
Says who? Says that expert on all things Iranian Will Heaven!!! - no reasoned argument, no understanding of the facts, no evidence but Will has decreed that NiteOwl is putting people's lives at risk. End of discussion. (Funny that reminds me of a certain Friday Prayers back on the 19th June when the SL said 'The election is over, AN has won, now go home')
You didn't need either Niteowl or Scott Lucas to discredit you, you did a good job of that yourself. Long after this is over and your name has disappeared in oblivion, people in tearooms all over Iran was still remember what these two guys & twitter did for them.
When I told my Iranian spouse about your article, their response was "what does he know? of course Twitter etc has been crucial in getting information out"
You should have taken on that sage advice that Maliheh reminded you of.
Excellent points, by Josh, Scott, Roe Lassie, Rev Magdalen, Free Iran, and so many other commentators. A few more positive thoughts, cross-posted from The Nite Owl and my blog, from my perspective as a social network researcher and activist in the US:
I saw a quote from Mousavi that said “The first step that I suggest as a solution is that we Iranians, no matter where we live in the world, strengthen the social ties among ourselves…. This is where the power of our social network resides.” The Sea of Green their supporters have been extraordinarily good at using online communication to unleash the power of this social network. There was a great example of this (now conveniently forgotten by all the critics) in the protests right after the election, when discussions of #cnnfail on Twitter pushed CNN to increase their coverage. The Mousavi Facebook page's role is another good example: anybody on Facebook can follow along easily enough -- and just as easily let their friends and acquaintances know about important news.
These effects are likely to increase over time, because the social network has expanded, the connections between the people in it have deepened, and there are more shared experiences. A lot people who hadn't given a lot of thought to democracy and freedom in Iran are now involved and doing what they can to help. People who have been following #iranelection regularly know who is and isn't credible -- and we have a shared history and vocabulary. And while it's too early to know, it's quite possible that #cn4iran is going to be very significant going forward. So cynics like Will Heaven and Evgeny Morozov may well be in for a surprise.
Yay for chubby fingers!
jon
[...] am · Filed under Uncategorized In this article I dont need to go into deep analysis of Will Heaven as there has been ample discussion on him and is blatantly obvious where he comes from but it is [...]