Iranian Tweets Heard ‘Round the World

Iranian Protests Brought to You by Twitter and Social Media

by Casey Barger

Forget about watching the five o’clock news or reading the morning paper. If you are looking for updates on the election protests in Iran, you should be following the minute-by-minute Twitter updates.

Protests over the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s president have led to what some are calling Twitters “biggest moment”. Following the presidential elections, the cities in Iran witnessed some of the largest street riots since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. While the Iranian government attempted to restrict access to controversial websites and text messaging, tweets began to leak out online about the uproar throughout the country.

Tweets even began to target cable news networks, claiming that they were not devoting enough time and resources to Iran election coverage. In response to the trending Twitter topic #CNNFail, CNN did increase their coverage of the events in Iran. Evidently, Twitter has made quite an impact on the news world. Not only has it become a supplement to traditional news outlets, but it also places pressure on these sources to cover in depth, fast changing events.

In this particular instance, Twitter was the ideal medium to cover the mass protesting. Why? Because it is easy for the average citizen to access and to use and very hard for a central authority to control. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers are being whited out and censored by the government, the Twitterverse is exploding with real time information directly from the streets.

So, the next time you feel your news channel hasn’t given you the whole story, take a look at Twitter!