The Revolution will be Twittered... this time in Iran

Iranian activists successfully got Twitter to suspend a planned interruption of service today because it has become an indispensable communication tool. Twitter and the other new media applications of the day -- Facebook, Flikr, YouTube and all -- have once again become indispensable tools in the repertoires of contention of activists in a less-than-democratic country.

So when Twitter announced Monday it would temporarily suspend the service for an hour the next day it immediately spurred a wave of requests not to take away what has become a key communication and organizational tool for post-election activism. Iran has taken press credentials from foreign media and kicked them out of the country and banned their broadcasts. It shut Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau and imprisoned journalists. But it ca't stop Twitter, which works via Internet and mobile phones and is too dispersed and instantaneous and pervasive to block. So real information and images are getting out.

“@twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down,” wrote Moussavi1388, a feed with nearly 11,000 followers that serves as a virtual newsroom, providing information about protests and press conferences. People began posting tweets about the need to prevent the planned outage and shortly after 4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday morning in Iran, the company announced it would suspend the planned upgrade in acknowledgment of its role in facilitating communication in and out of Iran.

Messages with #IranElection, a tag that enables users to search for all tweets on that subject, was the most popular tag on Twitter Tuesday, with more than 70 new posts a minute coming in Tuesday night. Tehran was the second most popular.

Mosavi’s Facebook page, which lists his current position as “president” or Iran, has more than 54,000 members posting pictures and videos that are helping to document the largest protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution as well as government violence that has left at least eight activists dead.

But blogs and Twitter feeds can also be seen by governmental authorities, prompting a campaign Tuesday evening to encourage people around the world to change their profiles to help protect activists in Iran.

“Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30” read the tweets sent by hundreds of users in an effort to make it more difficult for the government to track down those blogging inside Iran.

This is certainly not the first time Twitter has helped activists organize, as I've written many posts about its use in Egypt in particular (it has also been used in Moldova, Lebanon, China, etc). But of course, my detailed research is on Egypt, so if you want to read more about how activists in the Middle East use Twitter click here!