When protests broke out in Iran after the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President, news filtered out via some non-traditional means. Twitter was at the forefront, allowing ordinary Iranians to tell their side of the story to the world. For that reason, Twitter purposely delayed site maintenance in order to keep the flow going.

Twitter may first of all be a social network but it’s also now fulfilling a wider role as a means of breaking news stories and allowing updates to flow out of countries which don’t take kindly to foreign journalists. Such as Iran.

On June 12, 2009 Iran held presidential elections. The current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was elected with 63 percent of the vote. However, a large proportion of the country, as well as the governments of other countries, disputed the result and questioned irregularities which allegedly took place during the vote.

Supporters of the losing candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, then took to the streets in protest. What followed was disastrous, with government forces using power to stop the protests. Some were shot dead, including a young woman who has now become a martyr to the cause. At this point, Twitter was the main source of news for those of us outside of Iran, and the main source of a voice for those inside the country.

There were reports at the time that Twitter had actually delayed site maintenance in order to keep the site live for this Iranians wanting to report on the latest happenings. And that has now been confirmed, with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams telling BBC Newsnight:

We did delay some technical work. We had scheduled maintenance that would have been during the middle of the night or during the off-peak hours for us but it happened to be a very key time in Iran. We ended up putting that off a day or so, so that it was more in the middle of the night there.

There were many people who asked us to do that, including someone from the State Department, but that’s not why we did it. We did it because we thought it was the best thing for supporting the information flow there at a crucial time, and that’s kind of what we’re about – supporting the open exchange of information. So it seemed like the right thing to do.

This is a quite shocking but admirable admission. It seems Twitter is readily accepting that its role has gone beyond merely allowing us to update our friends with the minutiae of our days. While I don’t wholeheartedly agree with Ashton Kutcher’s claim that Twitter has changed news forever, the site definitely has a part to play in empowering people to report the facts as they see it.

For most of us that’s a bonus, but for Iranians it’s currently a lifeline to the outside world.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 1:20 am under Internet, Opinion, Politics, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
Stumble It!