Azure Jane Lunatic (azurelunatic) wrote,
Azure Jane Lunatic
azurelunatic
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Iran's having a bit of a revolution right now, and all I can do is Twitter.

Quick recap: Iran had an election. The results of the election were ... dodgy, given that the favorite had many more supporters than there were votes counted for him. His supporters decided that a rally was in order. Government disinformation (rally is canceled, and so forth) was spread. People are communicating by any means possible there, including Twitter. All the information that the Western media is getting out of there is via the internet, via people there who are risking their lives to get it out on Twitter, on YouTube, through proxies, I believe occasionally by telephone? People there, like @StopAhmadi and @persiankiwi are acting as communications hubs with their friends, family, and contacts: tracking rumors, relaying information about where there are beatings, where there are shootings, where there are fires, whether people are taking in strangers stranded on the streets (yes).

A bit of history and some warnings.

Huffington Post liveblog coverage

Semi-organized live firehose: http://iran.twazzup.com/ (selected twitter bloggers plus relevant keywords, updating live)


If anyone wants to wade through what I already shared today from Twitter, I have this morning's tweets archived already, thanks to wibbble, who tweaked the usual posting script to run twice today in case I overloaded it (and it was a good job he did, because it would have).

Right now activists are pleading with Twitter to postpone their maintenance, because people in range of the chaos are using it as part of their communications network, and Twitter going down would endanger their lives.

People following, my dears, please take time to see to your own needs as well. Tweeting and retweeting, you are a node passing packets, and the network heals itself if one node has to go down, so long as there's a network. This is the model the internet was built on. This is how it works.
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