The Twitter Revolution In Iran

What we are witnessing in Iran is the first ever geek-led revolution. You've heard of the Orange Revolution, the Cedar Revolution, and the Rose Revolution. Upon further reflection, Iran is just the place for a Twitter Revolution. It boasts the world's highest per capita number of bloggers.

The Iranian regime is complaining that the U.S. government is behind the Twitterfest, but they couldn't be more wrong. The government has had little to do with it. (Aside from a few tepid remarks by Obama and the State Department requesting not to shutdown Twitter for scheduled site maintenance.)

Rather, the people of America - not the government - are helping the Iranian people who are bravely slugging it out in the streets after their election. 

Take the example of Austin Heap, a S.F. computer programmer. He is helping everyday Iranians get around the censors through the use of proxy servers. (A proxy server helps its users conceal their identity.) 

His blog, which lists proxy servers and now password protects them, has grown from a few dozen hits a day to over 100,000 in less than twenty-four hours. People are emailing in to him saying where there are more proxy servers and thanking him for helping them reconnect with loved ones. Even though he's receiving death threats from people within Iran, he knows that he has to continue helping out the Twitter revolution going on there. Unfortunately, he was detected, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. 

By mid-Tuesday, Iran appeared to be blocking all non-encrypted Internet traffic, making the 1,600 new proxy-server addresses now in his in-box temporarily useless. But Heap was working with other professionals and companies seeking new ways to reconnect.
"I haven't been in the middle of an outpouring like this, ever. And it makes me incredibly proud of the IT community," he said.
While it's not clear how much impact Heap's efforts are having, history may look back on his tweets about proxy servers as a profound moment in political evolution, said Stanford's Milani [a professor specializing in Iranian politics]

One growthology's favorite books is Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing with Organizations. If you want to understand the Iranian Twittering Revolution, go out right now and buy the book. Or sit at home and order it.  

Shirky describes how for a time, a teenage girl was the Western world's only access point for the coup that ousted the Thai prime minister. Her blog posts on the topic went viral. 

Here's how he described what is going on in Iran right now during a Q&A with TED. Shirky gave a great TED Talk in 2008 and with full disclosure in mind, the Kauffman Foundation, is a TED sponsor.

I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that ... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

. . . 

So how does this play out?
It's complex. The Ahmadinejad supporters are going to use the fact of English-speaking and American participation to try to damn the dissidents. But whatever happens from here, the dissidents have seen that large numbers of American people, supposedly part of "the great Satan," are actually supporters. Someone tweeted from Tehran today that "the American media may not care, but the American people do." That's a sea-change.

Comments

[Charlie Poole]

Great post Tim!