Twitter spearheads Iranian elections coverage

Iranian tweeters provide peek into closed society

By Brad Reed, Network World
June 15, 2009 11:19 AM ET

. What's this?

This past weekend, something strange happened in the U.S. media landscape: Twitter helped shape coverage of the Iranian elections protests.

12 top Twitter tools
Safe tips for social networking

The protests were sparked by what Iranian reformists and several Middle Eastern reporters and analysts believe to be a widespread fraud at last week's Iranian presidential election that saw controversial incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad allegedly win 63% of the vote. Because the Iranian government has successfully stifled serious dissent within its borders for the past 30 years, the spectacle of mass demonstrations in its capital streets was something tailor-made for America's 24-hour cable news networks

But all throughout Saturday, as the demonstrations engulfed the Iranian capital of Tehran, America's three cable news stations were taking flack for their relative silence. As Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney documented through searching the transcript database at TVEyes.com, American news networks on June 13 were mentioning Iran with far less frequency than networks overseas. Although CNN led the way among American networks with 91 mentions, it was still dwarfed by Canada's CTV (124 mentions), Britain's Sky News (149 mentions) and BBC News (177 mentions).

Related Content

This disparity led several frustrated users on Twitter to angrily complain that CNN, which had made its mark covering foreign events such as the first Gulf War and the Tiananmen Square protests, had dropped the ball. Using the Twitter hashtag "#CNNfail," Tweeters mocked the network's lack of coverage, particularly its decision to show a Larry King repeat on Saturday night while Iranians marched through the capital streets and clashed with riot police.

By Sunday morning the "#CNNfail" hashtag had climbed into Twitter's trending topics list and CNN felt compelled to respond. As Pitney noted in an update at Huffington Post on Sunday night, "for the last few hours, CNN has been airing pretty consistent coverage of the Iran unrest, even referencing the Twitter-driven protests of their coverage." By Sunday evening, Pitney showed that CNN had stepped up its game and made more mentions of Iran on Sunday than any of the big international networks.

But Twitter wasn't merely used to pressure the major networks to get on the story – it was also being used to deliver on-the-ground reports from both professional journalists and Iranian protestors themselves. Native Iranian Tweeters such as persiankiwi, StopAhmadi, IranElection09 and Change_for_Iran were providing real-time updates of protests in their areas, as well as linking to pictures and videos of riot police beating demonstrators with batons and breaking up peaceful protests.

Although the Iranian government's main telecommunications provider had shut off text messaging services and had cut off access to most social networking Web sites by Monday morning, Iranian Tweeters were still able to communicate with the outside world using a continuously shifting series of proxy servers that they were posting periodically on Twitter throughout the day. Additionally, the Tweeters were instructing their followers to use pagereboot.com, a site that automatically refreshes Web addresses every second, to launch distributed DoS attacks on key government Web sites. Iranians also used Twitter to organize nighttime rooftop rallies where demonstrators would climb to the roofs of their buildings and chant slogans protesting the alleged fraudulent election.