The presidential elections in Iran are being held on June 12, 2009 and will be the country's 10th such election. There are 3 leading candidates right now. Incumbant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running against Iran Reform Movement candidate and former Prime Minister Mousavi. Former Speaker of the Majlis (Parliament) Mehdi Karroubi, another Reformist candidate, also intends to run.

As All Facebook's Nick O'Neill puts it, "unfortunately for the Iranians, they have a regime in place that doesn't support freedom of speech and would prefer to run a dictatorship". Those of us who enjoy such freedoms should do our part to make sure that censorship like this never happens to us. We wish our brothers and sisters in Iran the best of luck.

Facebook Response:

When we first learned of this story we immediately contacted Facebook to see what they had to say. They were gracious to respond swiftly with this comment from a Facebook spokesperson:

"We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in Iran may not have access to
Facebook, especially at a time when voters are turning to the Internet as a source
of information about election candidates and their positions. We are investigating
these reports.

We believe that people around the world should be able to use Facebook to
communicate and share information with their friends, family and coworkers. It is
always a shame when a countries' cultural and political concerns lead to limits
being placed on the opportunity for sharing and expression that the Internet
provides."

SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate.

Iran's broken digital communication infrastructure caused many Iranians to turn to services such as Twitter, using proxies to work around government restrictions for web use. Twitter became so integral to Iranians' communication, particularly with the wider global community, that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance which would have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the election and resultant protests. Other services rushed to add Persian translation features.

Hopefully, the unblocking of text messaging in Iran is a sign that communication channels are returning to normal. So, does this mean that everyone's new favorite color, "Solidarity Green," will begin to fade away from social web avatars sometime soon? Once the country and its government emerge from crisis mode, what news will come from Iran, and what will the Internet have to say about it?

Is it doing any good? Do our efforts, symbolic or concrete, have any impact? We don't really know. Critics will point out that, for the most part, people are jumping on a bandwagon. Very few of us have any real grasp of Iran's political or social complexities; we have no idea who the leading opposition candidate is or what kind of record he has (and most of us would recoil if we found out). All true.

What we do have, though, is a shared belief in human dignity, and a shared recognition that this is a chance for that cause to take a big step forward. Green avatars are, in a sense, a way of signaling as much to each other: "Yeah, I care about this, too." Perhaps we do this to show solidarity as much with each other as with the people of Iran.

More Noise to Signal.

The French Press Agency reported on the bill yesterday and according to The Committee to Protect Bloggers, the BBC's The World radio show will offer a more in depth report in the coming days.

Blogging is wildly popular in Iran, where a new generation of young people frequently challenge the old, hyper-conservative religious government. The Committe to Protect Bloggers says that Iran is "among the worst offenders in terms of harassing, arresting and imprisoning bloggers, as well as students." You can see the group's extensive coverage of Iranian cyber-censorship and harrasment of bloggers here. The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook, Yahoo! and Flickr, among other sites.

We at ReadWriteWeb condemn the application of the death penalty to bloggers as itself an abhorent crime. Cultural relativism has its place, but this isn't it. We want to offer our support to the new generation of Iranian young people struggling for freedom online and elsewhere, in any way we can, short of a US invasion of the country.

Twitter decided yesterday to delay a scheduled downtime for maintenance until the middle of the night, Iran time. CNN reports that the decision was made at the suggestion of the State Department, but a large number of users suggested it as well. Incidentally, open source Twitter alternative Identi.ca, which has the potential to be much more useful due to its decentralized nature, followed Twitter's lead and also made major changes at a time convenient for Iranians.

Some critics have argued that news of US government collaboration with Twitter will offer the Iranian government more leverage in calling them insurgent agents of the US. The CNN report was confirmed this afternoon by Reuters. BoingBoing has a good write up on how to help, not hurt, the efforts in Iran.

We've been following news from Iraq via this excellent aggregator built by Twitter search engine Twazzup, by watching the StopAhmadi account in particular and by reading Robert Fisk's excellent coverage for context.

Twitter cynics take note - this service is clearly not just for posting about what people ate for lunch anymore. We wish the Twitter team luck in fighting to keep the lines of communication open.

Now, at least one team - the minds behind BabelWith.me - has developed the functionality into a cool, useful chat application that capably (if not perfectly) translates chats in real time. The service enables simultaneous communication in up to 45 different languages. It's kind of like the U.N. of IM.

The chat dialog shows both the original text as well as the Google-powered translation. Granted, the translations aren't perfect; Google doesn't know how to deal with "pig latin" or "pommes frites." But it's manageable and functional, for the most part.

We tested it out and do wish the program had a timestamp feature and some kind of notification or alert. Unnoticed chats went ignored with nary a flash, blink, or beep until we came back to the window or tab containing the chat room. We did love that the program gave both the original text (in orange italics) underneath the translated version. And of course, all the static text in the chat is translated, as well.

We were also told by the BabelWith.me team, "The launch was moved up to offer free multilanguage communication with those in Iran." Check out this chat set up specifically for discussion of the Iran election and aftermath.

BabelWith.me is a product of the non-profit organization LifeChurch.tv.

It's reminiscent of the recent film Persepolis and helps put "social media" in a much more serious context than people often presume it goes on in.

The short video was created by Aaron Chiesa, Hendy Sukarya, Lisa Temes and Toru Kageyama and written by Kate Tremills.

To learn more about the struggles, victories and defeats of bloggers around the world, check out The Committee to Protect Bloggers, Global Voices Online and Reporters Without Borders.

In the aftermath of the election, during which a (some say statistically improbable landslide) victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced, the social media buzz grew into a roar as a meme began to circulate: Where Is My Vote. A website, several Facebook pages, and now thousands of tweets have ensured few social web users have not yet heard of the controversy and the Iranian government's response of censorship.

"In coordination with Twitter," Stone wrote, "our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran... Our partners are taking a huge risk, not just for Twitter, but also the other services they support worldwide--we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective."

Citizens Had Taken to Twitter to Report and Find News

Although, as noted above, sources cannot be verified at this time, the vast majority of tweets we have seen tell stories of violent military reactions to protesters:

Many more tweets are linking to news coverage and photo or video evidence of what is happening on the ground during these protests.

Iranian Censorship of the Social Web

The Wall Street Journal reported this afternoon that many inside the country have resorted to overseas proxies to continue to use the websites. However, as proxies appeared on the web, they were gradually blocked. Many are now calling for users to stop publicly announcing proxies and use private channels such as email instead.

Blocked Hashtags, Changed Locations, & Other Misinformation

Still more non-Iranian users are changing their Twitter profile locations and time zones to reflect that they are in Iran. These users are often also posting green-tinted versions of their avatars. Some say this is a show of solidarity; other users insist this action will somehow "screw with the government's head."

As one Twitter user said and as several others would likely agree, "Most of the people on Twitter are [expletive deleted] retarded."

Changing one's avatar and location would likely do little to affect the Iranian government; these actions are simply a sign to a user's followers that he or she has at least a cursory interest in Iran current events.

As the conflict continues, Twitter users are reminded that the best, most useful information to share is that which is most verifiable and hence most likely to be accurate. Retweeting biased or exaggerated accounts damages any cause by feeding a hype cycle and drawing attention away from the heart of the matter. At the very least, users should attempt to search for and verify information before passing it on.

As Twitter became the star platform for Iranians to convey breaking news from on the ground, Facebook has been quiet by comparison. Now, by releasing an edition in the official language of Iran (also colloquially called Farsi), its attempting to capture some of the revolutionary self-expression that has thus far passed it by.

Whatever the language, Facebook pales in comparison to other social mediums currently in use for speedy transmission of events. To Iranians, Facebook is likely to be neither as familiar a publishing medium as blogs, nor relatively easy to access in the face of crackdowns (like Twitter is).

Persian Facebook might be viable for something with a longer-term vision, with groups and causes being better for cohesive political organizing than an amalgamation of hashtagged tweets. But for now, Facebook is decidedly ill-suited to helping Iranians to speak to the world.

Is Persian Necessary At All?

With one of the largest and most active blogospheres in the world, Iranians are not hurting for tools to express themselves politically and culturally online. They're just hurting for free access to them, which Facebook may not be able to provide considering it was blocked shortly before the election, and may even remain so.

As far as Twitter and other platforms go, the vast majority of those tweeting from within Iran are doing so in English. Adding a private, Persian-language social network to the mix isn't likely to aid those with the aim of communicating with the rest of the globe.

The western world's most feared government is shaking with insurrection in the streets after a contested election and the leading name in news, CNN, is shockingly absent from the story. Twitter, meanwhile, is how Iranians are communicating with the outside world. It's the best place to follow events going on in that country and CNN's failure to engage with the story is one of the hottest topics of conversation there.

Hours after Iranian police began clashing with tens of thousands of people in the street, the top story on CNN.com remains peoples' confusion about the switch from analog TV signals.

Update: See Tom's Tech Blog on Sunday morning for a well written critique of our coverage of these events. By Sunday morning the conflict in Iran was the top story on CNN.com, though, so the extenuating circumstances that blog post brings up don't seem to explain what took so long in the heat of the action.

Political blog aggregator Memeorandum is all Iran right now and is a great place to get in-depth information. The BBC is covering the story well, we found this video posted to YouTube. It's being passed around Twitter. These photos on Flickr are good, too. This video from LiveLeak is quite moving, if likely to cause motion-sickness. Twitter search engine Twazzup has created a great aggregator page for real-time multi-media updates from and about Iran. Andrew Sullivan writes well about the extensive use of Twitter by Iranians in the uprising. There's a collection of Twitter accounts and other media from Iranians over at Reddit. This in a country where the government recently debated applying the death penalty for subversive blogging.

Barack Obama has a good excuse for not engaging substantially with the protests in the streets - if he condemns the incumbent's claim of victory then negotiations around nuclear weapons will be much more difficult. What's CNN's excuse?

Twenty years ago CNN's coverage of Tienanmen Square made its reputation. If in twenty more years it has become consensus that real-time, online, crowdsourced media is the best place to keep up with current events, this incident could be an important part of that history unfolding.

No cause of death is yet known, but the Committee says torture of bloggers is common in Iran and they are usually placed in close proximity to the most dangerous criminals in any facility. Misayafi was sentenced in December to 30 months in prison "for insulting Islamic Republic Leaders." The man said he was a cultural blogger, not a political one, and only wrote a few satirical articles that got him into trouble.

We've reported here on a number of bloggers imprisoned in Iran and in Egypt for documenting government abuses or just writing critical words about governments that demand total compliance. In the middle of last year we wrote about Iran's parliament debating legislation that would add the death penalty to the list of possible punishments for using blogs to challenge government authority.

It is a timeless battle all around the world between freedom, art and self expression on one side and authority, expediency and abuse on the other. The rise of the web has made that battle different, though. Blogs give a voice to the previously voiceless, and the historical and moral importance of efforts to save those new voices from arrest, torture and death cannot be overstated.

We would love to see the Obama administration, which has made extensive use of online social media, publicly and explicitly condemn this death at the Iranian government's hands. We'd be surprised if that happened.

Social media is powerful and changing the world; we don't expect that this will be the last person to lose their life over it. Omid Reza Misayafi, brave Iranian blogger, may you rest in peace. May all those imprisoned for blogging in Iran, and around the world, be set free.

For ongoing coverage of this and all-too similar situations around the world, see The Committee to Protect Bloggers and associated organizations linked to on their site.

One key thread in that conversation: are the rules different for journalists - for instance, around repeating rumors - when they're blogging than when they're writing for the front page?

What are your rules? Is any conversation potential blog fodder, or have you drawn sharp, inviolable boundaries in your life?

More Noise to Signal

It can't be assumed that all the proxies were created to support Iranian protesters, but they were probably all shared for that purpose. Renesys reports that the rate of proxy creation appears to have slumped dramatically over the last few days and newly shared proxies are now being added quickly to the official list of filtered destinations online. This could have consequences for the political movement's global visibility and underlines how important it is for everyday people to create proxies and share them with friends overseas ahead of time.

Renesys offers the following explanation of how proxies work:

A proxy server is a simple bit of software that you run on your computer. It effectively lets you share your computer with anonymous strangers as a "repeater" for content that they aren't allowed to fetch themselves. For example, an Iranian web browser might be manually configured to use your computer (identified by an IP address and a port number) as a Web proxy. When your anonymous friend reads twitter.com, or posts a tweet, the request goes via your computer, instead of to Twitter's web server directly. Except for a little delay, and the fact that your friend gets to see what the uncensored Internet looks like from New York or London or São Paolo instead of Tabriz or Qom, surfing through a proxy is pretty much like surfing without one.

The United States may have offered up more proxies than anywhere else, but the effort has truly been global. "The USA and Western Europe were well-represented, but so were China, India, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Vietnam," the firm wrote today. "87 countries in all, a pretty impressive breadth of representation, considering the relatively small size of this sample."

Unfortunately the construction of Iran's sophisticated censorship system was a global effort as well; the Wall St. Journal reported this weekend that Siemens and Nokia sold the Iranian government the technology that's being used to track down and silence protesters.

Renesys notes that public sharing of the proxies is making it too easy for the Iranian government to find and control them. The company suggests that it's far better to create proxies and start sharing them with people living under repressive governments ahead of major conflict - "don't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war."

If you would like to think ahead and set up a proxy for sharing with friends who could need it, Glype.com is one service you might begin with.

MG Siegler found Pfeifle's editorial and reported on it; he seems to think it's funny - and it is. I think the idea is also serious enough, though, to warrant some closer consideration. I think those little narcissistic bites of information and the platform people publish them on are serious enough to warrant taking this opportunity to consider what it all really means. You might assume that these most recent platitudes are just about Twitter's celebrated role in Iran - but in fact there's a lot more going on. Twitter is changing the human experience in important ways, for those fortunate enough to experience it.

Some people believe that Twitter represents a general state of self-absorbed thoughtlessness in a culture drowning in pointless, irresponsible, self-indulgence and celebrity obsession. And they think it's stupid.

In fact, almost everyone thinks it's stupid until they give it a good honest try. I certainly did, until I decided to give it one single week of attention in a limited professional context. That was several years ago now and my embrace of Twitter ended up being anything but limited. I wrote once that Twitter is paying my rent, because I get so many story leads, quotes and other valuable tidbits from it. This week three out of my last four articles here have been about Twitter and I am about to buy my first house.

That's not why Twitter should be awarded a Nobel Prize of course, though I do appreciate it. At this point there may only be a few thousand people in the world making extensive use of Twitter for work - but that number will grow.

Some people try Twitter because the media talks about it a lot, some try it because friends are on it and others try it because they are told that they must, lest they become terminally un-hip and get put out to pasture.

Once you're there, though, and once you make a meaningful number of connections on the service (something that's still too difficult for new users to do) then Twitter becomes much more than just another website.

There's a reason why so many journalists, lawyers, moms, animal doctors, students and other normal people are so obsessed with Twitter - and it's not because they are flighty, superficial people intent on telling the world what they ate for breakfast.

Remember when Wikipedia was laughed at, because anyone could edit it? Most people feel differently about that site now, and it's not hard to see a future in which many more people will come to appreciate Twitter as something more important than they do today. Just like Wikipedia has become one of the best tools to include as part of any research project (no one argues that it's a definitive source) so too could Twitter in particular and "microblogging" in general end up on the short list of the best ways humanity has to communicate with each other.

What Is It, Really?

The creators of Twitter deserve big accolades because they have invented what could be compared to a newly discovered, very usable, radio-wave frequency. It's a new plane of communication. It's truly world changing.

Twitter isn't like SMS text messages because the visibility of Twitter messages isn't limited to a finite set of intended recipients. Twitter messages are both personal and public, targeted and broadcast, experienced individually and available for aggregate analysis by anyone who cares to process them.

Twitter is synchronous and asynchronous. It's for one on one, small group and very large group conversations. All at once!

It's a place for serendipitous discovery of the unexpected and it's a place you can go to find answers to very specific questions.

Perhaps most importantly, it's a tool that lets messages leap from person to person, from one friend network to another, in a matter of minutes, all over the world. Email enables that as well, but there's honestly a significantly greater amount of friction to sending an email than there is retweeting a tweet.

It does all this and yet it's just a box that asks "what are you doing?"

By looking into the flowing river of conversation, made up of the contents of all those little "what are you doing" prompts, a simple program can tell you (for example) that people who like knitting and live on the West Coast of the United States have been particularly active in discussing topics X, Y and Z in the last hour. What other tool on earth allows for all that?

Twitter is like a field of energy, buzzing with thoughts, feelings and information around the clock and accessible in many different ways.

An Open Network of Networks Could Be A Real World Changer

At least, it could be like a field of energy. Instead, right now, it's just a company that made some software. It's like the telephone, but it's not like the telephone. There are other telephone companies, but you can't call them and they can't call you if you are on Twitter and they are on, say Identi.ca or Yammer.

And that's why the founders of Twitter probably don't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. They have built a company that is threatening to transcend into being a phenomenon, but for now it is still a company. It's not as bad as the hermetically sealed Facebook, a related service with more bells and whistles, far less flexibility and visions of a cradle-to-grave empire. But Twitter remains limited and colored by its own business limitations. It remains a closed network, for one thing.

It's being used to change and document history in Iran but those messages won't be publicly available in a matter of virtual moments - try going back through Twitter search results, they just stop at a certain not-too-distant point in the past. If someone isn't doing something to change the lack of accessible archives on Twitter, it's absolutely criminal. (Martin Luther King Jr. probably wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize if he'd been unable to recount anything he'd done prior to a month before!)

Twitter is too opaque in its management and noxiously condescending in much of its official communication with its own users. That condescension is frustrating but it would be a mistake to assume that there's not a whole lot of thinking going on behind the curtain of PR at Twitter. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, was a co-founder of Blogger, another world-changing company that largely gave way to the paradigm it helped usher in and to other service providers. He's a smart man and is, no doubt, surrounded by smart people pumped up and thinking about the fact that they work for one of the most exciting companies on the internet.

Twitter is a magical thing. It will be even more magical once it opens up to communication with other networks, solves the problem of archiving what could be historically important conversations, facilitates greater amounts of conversation analysis and of course, grows in size. It's safe to assume that all of that is being worked on, at least by some people working at Twitter.

Those are the kinds of changes that will make Twitter a more powerful tool in the service of global communication and understanding, of peace. Decentralization, archiving and other foundational features of a robust communication system could make a big difference in the next Iran-type situation. Once those things happen, this new medium will be all the more worthy of really big public recognition. Even before that point, it's not at all an absurd idea to discuss.

For a counterpoint to much of this thinking see this long post critiquing the Twitter/Iran connection by Max Forte of Open Anthropology.

While most people visiting the site right now will be interested in the unfolding events in Iran following an alleged fraudulent presidential election there, you can search virtually any subject you choose. There is a dedicated "breaking news" search right below the search bar, as well as other more "nifty" searches for things like "WTF", "funny", "Vegas", "OMG", "love", "Obama", "beach", etc. But beware, if you are more of the adventurous sort then try to search for something like "boobs" but remember this; you can't unsee what might appear before you and that could be quite disturbing. Better just stick to current international events and tech stuff, people. Trust me.

Be sure to follow @picbrk updates on Twitter for more information.