News feature: Twitter gives the people of Iran a voice

On 12 June 2009 voters went to the Iranian polls to decide a new president between the two main candidates, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who would rule for his second consecutive term since 2005 if he won, and Mir Hossein Mousavi. Mousavi was expected by Iranians to win as he was the favourite of the reformists and is seen as principled and eager to reform Iran. Ahmadinejad in contrast, is known as an authoritarian in Iran, and does not want to change or develop the political system or way of life in Iran. He also asserts an anti-Western mindset.

However, Ahmadinejad won the polls by a surprising 30% margin. Mousavi immediately sent a letter to Iran’s clerical group, the Guardian Council, calling for the election to be cancelled. He claimed that he was the real winner, and that dishonesty and fraud were rife in the country and the votes had clearly been rigged. This was confirmed by a number of outside experts.

Despite this, on 5 August, Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term as Iran’s president. Since the election, there have been violent protests in Tehran, and more peaceful Iranian protests in London. In Iran at least 30 protesters have been killed by the riot police, and hundreds arrested. With the press being controlled by the state, and foreign reporting greatly restricted inside Tehran, one of the few ways the world and even Iranians could find out about this is through natives who have been tweeting anonymously from inside Tehran.

The microblogging internet service known as Twitter enabled people and protesters to be hugely informative in monitoring and circulating useful information about the protests and unfair treatment of the protesters by the Iranian authorities. With each ‘tweet’ containing up to just 140 characters, Twitter is playing a part in the huge communication explosion that has been taking place throughout postmodernism.

However, here Twitter has been put to positive use and has created another voice for the unheard, the oppressed and minority groups acting not just as an interpersonal communications mode but filling in the gap left when mainstream media has been ‘closed down’.

This is postmodern pluralism – the denotation that different sets of values exist rather than just one single approach – at its best.

One protester, Vahab Ashkan, has been protesting outside the Iranian Embassy in London for three weeks and speaks about the importance of Twittering,

“Twittering has been very helpful as there are no journalists left in Iran and without twittering no-one would know what is going on.

“What you now know about how our protesters have been treated has been happening for the last 30 years but the voices have been shut off. Now this is how the world is finally realising what is happening to us after 30 years of us saying it over and over – through technology.”

Alan Kirby, author of Digimodernism which will be released in Europe in late September, believes that Twitter is part of a movement called ‘digimodernism’, something that has arisen and is part of postmodernism.

Alan says that the Twitter and blogging mediums have helped bring about action amongst the Iranian people.

“In exceptional circumstances such as this one in Iran at the present moment, when a society is being re-formed through war or political crisis or collective disputes, the haphazardness, onwardness and temporality of the digimodernist text such as blogging or Twitter are ideally suited to the broadcasting of information on a wide scale. It can then be intended as the basis for action, and I think in this case it certainly has been.”

It is this ‘haphazardness’ and anonymity that has given Twitter and other social medias their success in communicating with the world about the situation in Iran. On Facebook alone, there are hundreds of groups and pages that are calling for democracy and freedom in Iran, and are protesting against the treatment of the protesters. The creator of one of these groups which is called Facebook for Democracy in Iran, who wishes his identity to remain anonymous, says that because of the internet and Facebook he has been able to notify group members of the whereabouts of different protests and the truth behind the state-controlled Iranian press coverage of the protests.

“We now have 245,580 members who belong to this Facebook group. The group also has its own Twitter site. I use Twitter to communicate with the Facebook group members about what has been happening in Tehran throughout the election process.

“There are many who are tweeting from inside Tehran and we are the only ones who are able to put the truth out there, I believe. Many journalists have already been imprisoned but the authorities cannot catch those who use blogs or Twitter, and I am sure this infuriates them.”

Conversely though, because Twitter is so miniature, it is not really journalism. Twitter is snippets of information and the nature of the character space doesn’t allow for qualification. Furthermore, you don’t always know if what is being said is definitely true, and often the information is not credible, well-sourced or objective. However, in this case, it is a good tool that has helped give the people of Iran a voice, which would otherwise be suppressed by the authorities.