Status Anxiety

20 June 2009

In Iran, Twitter has been a technological Scarlet Pimpernel

Even celebrities, the Twitter users most often singled out by its critics, have been playing their part. Stephen Fry, who boasts over 200,000 followers on the site, has been busy tweeting IP addresses and port numbers to enable Iranians to get around the government crackdown. His tweets are immediately re-tweeted by his followers — and those re-tweets are then re-tweeted again, reaching millions of people. Fry has become an intelligence asset for the Iranian opposition movement, transmitting new ways of communicating via Twitter before Ahmadinejad’s security officers have had a chance to shut them down. Thanks to Twitter, one man and his iPhone can effectively become a bigger thorn in the side of a Middle Eastern dictator than the BBC’s Persian Service, which the Iranian authorities have successfully blocked.

Most internet entrepreneurs claim that their product will change the world. In the case of Jack Dorsey, that is turning out to be true.

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John Keenan

June 18th, 2009 5:03pm Report this comment

It’s a nice article Toby, but I think it’s overcooked. Much of the on-the-ground opposition seems to have been generated through old media – word of mouth. We media types in the west might get excited by the idea of a ‘Twitter revolution’ but we should tread with caution. Vote rigging aside, Ahmadinejad is genuinely popular with the poor, mainly rural, people – and they don’t have iPhones

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