Jim Stanton: June 2009 Archives

Political dissent in Iran in the aftermath of the national election has spread not only to the streets of Tehran, but also online, where protesters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and observers of the election have battled to get news out of the country for three days.

Cell phone service was restored Sunday June 13th after it had been down since Saturday, but Iranians could still not send text messages from their mobile phones. Government filters have also cracked down on opposition party websites and social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as mobile text messaging services.

Satellite Internet connections have also been disrupted. But that hasn't prevented bloggers and activists reporting from Iran by using proxy servers to get around the censors in a game of cat and mouse.

Citizenlab, which runs out of the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, is one of many groups making software available that allows citizens in Iran to sign on to a server that gives them secure access to web pages anywhere, bypassing government restrictions.

The software, PsiPhon, has been made available for Twitter users, as the social messaging tool has taken centre stage as a source of news from Iran since Saturday.

One of the more active posters of messages on Twitter, someone in Iran named persiankiwi, has attracted over 10,000 followers, with over 2,000 added in less  than a week "We are going offline to get a phone free for calling out. we are also moving location -- too long here -- is dangerous," the poster wrote at about 10:30 p.m. local time (2:00 p.m. ET), followed by a post an hour and a half later: "3 of our group missing from afternoon -- we have no news from them."

Twitter users in Iran have shared pictures from street protests, passed on information about which cities are affected by Internet and mobile phone outages and planned rallies and further protests.

There are also reports of distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) being launched on Iran government websites, though it's not clear what effect they are having.

The website of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad displayed a message reading "The maximum number of users reached, Server is too busy, please try again later," but there are reports that Internet access across the country is sporadic.

As one person with the Twitter name azarnoush reports from Shiraz, Iran: "Internet is at the lowest possible speed."

Despite these attempts at censorship, the world is getting citizen perspectives on the Iranian protest movement.

Photo by Shahram Sharif. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

Celebrities, media personalities and athletes are increasingly being misrepresented in the world of social media.

Tony La Russa, manager of baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, is suing the Twitter, claiming that an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.

The Philadelphia Daily News recently published comments from Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Asante Samuel's Twitter feed, only to find that his words were being tweeted by an imposter.

Media personality Keith Olbermann also was a victim of Twitter fraud, and CNN recently acquired the rights to CNNbrk (CNN Breaking News), the largest Twitter account on record with 959,011 followers. The account was being administered by James Cox, who is not affiliated with the news station.

This all comes at a time of fierce competition between CNN and Ashton Kutcher to have the first Twitter account with 1 million followers. At the moment, the well known actor has about 941,749 followers and singer Britney Spears is in third place with 926,862 followers.

According to two media experts at Temple University, we should expect more social network fraud, something that local governments should be alert to as they move to embrace these new media tools to communicate with citizens.

Professor Susan Jacobson of Temple's School of Communications and Theater compares Twitter fraud to what happened in the early days of the Internet when regular people would rush to buy domain names (i.e., www.madonna.com) and then sell them to celebrities for millions of dollars.

Although she questions why the Daily News' journalists didn't check their sources, Jacobson notes in a press release: "We are still in the early stages of social media. These situations are bound to continue to happen until laws are enacted that prevent people from misrepresenting themselves. If social media follows the same model as the web, we will continue to see misrepresentations of celebrities on social media sites."

Frank Farley, another Temple expert on risk-taking adds that people would do something like this for two reasons: malicious or near criminal misrepresentation, or just to have fun by carrying out a prank.

"We shouldn't be surprised by this; I'm frankly surprised we haven't seen more of it. Through social media, we have created the capacity or opportunities for people to take such actions. It's the old 'If you build it they will come,'" said Farley.

Image from Jeroen Mirck. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic