File that fact away. We'll come back to it in a moment.
In 2009, protests broke out after the questioned elections in Iran. The western media, hungry for information, scraped up reports from unknown individuals who conveyed their data via Twitter. A strange, out-of-nowhere website called Tehran Bureau acted as a clearinghouse for these "tweets."
Problem: A lot of the information was simply fictitious. As NPR noted:
But who can tell what's reliable and what isn't on Twitter? It's impossible to know even if what you're reading was actually written by people in Tehran or elsewhere in Iran...
For instance, how do we know that Gabhan is really in Tehran and not, say, spoofing from Johannesburg?The false reports have now gone down the memory hole. Most Americans seem to have a vague sense that twitterings from Iran provided the scoop on what really happened.
My question: Why didn't the Iranian informants on Twitter use IRC instead? (Actually, some did -- but the Twitter users got all the press attention.)
IRC is still around. Millions of people use it every day, including a good many Iranians. The software is free, and one can access the system using various web portals. IRC is not and was not blocked. Savvy Iranians understand that one can use IRC in complete anonymity, using Tor to hide one's personal IP address.
You're probably wondering about the advantage of IRC. How (you ask) would that system have made the information more reliable? After all, we would still know very little about the people offering (alleged) first-hand in-country accounts.
True, true. But if you want to hop aboard IRC, you need to access an IRC server. And everyone who sees your messages will have know what server you are using -- which means that everyone will at least be able to tell what country you are in. Granted, Tor may hide that data, but those watching the data stream carefully may still be able to determine the originating country, even if the individual remains anonymous.
Sure, individuals within the country could still use the system to spread disinformation in order to heat up international tensions (which was the obvious goal of the recent disinfo blitz). But it takes a certain measure of courage, or at least chutzpah, for a foreign agent to pull off a scam like that from within Iran's borders. By contrast, it takes no guts at all to pretend to be twittering from Tehran when you are actually sipping a latte while typing on your laptop in a Starbucks in Georgetown.
Most importantly: If the disinformationist offers his fake reports on an IRC chat room called "TEHRAN," he has to share the stage with other users. Legitimate users can call bullshit on fake reports.
Not long ago, pundits offered a lot of blather about the "heroism" of the twitterers. One Christian Science Monitor columnist even suggested that the developers of Twitter should receive a Nobel Peace Prize. I call bullshit on that.
Meanwhile, over on Facebook: If you use Facebook, you've probably taken those silly quizzes -- i.e. "Which Batman villain are you?" But did you know that quiz-takers reveal all of their personal info to the quiz-writers -- even if the quiz-takers have set their profiles to "private"? Check it out.
When in paranoid mode -- and no, I'm not always in paranoid mode -- I've wondered about those quizzes. Maybe that seemingly innocuous information, along with all of the other info broadcast via social networking pages, can be fed into a engine analogous to the Personality Assessment System developed by John Gittinger of the CIA. Only now the personalities being assessed belong not to individuals but to whole populations. Maybe we're all being clocked.
Which Batman villain am I? The Joker -- because he doesn't feel compelled to reveal everything about himself.
3 comments:
Brilliant article. It really pisses me off that Twitter gets treated as so revolutionary when such a simple, and arguably more efficient protocl that's *old* gets ignored. Just because Twitter is 'hip.'
One would hope that the media would remember where they got their reports and information during the origianal Gulf War.
Social Networking seems to be a primary focus for the CIA in their need to disrupt our continuity. They do have an overall plan you know! It involves many social support functions that I would expect to surface eventually. One that will surprise many with how it works is called Facebook!
Marty Didier
Northbrook, IL
Nice work on this.
I do not bother with SN. Twitter is just another glorified way of sending a text message--big deal. I have no desire to be on Facebook or MySpace. I don't need them. If it's cool for others, fine.
As much as I like the Internet, I've grown to see more of the dark side of this technology. Does that mean I want it banned? No. But I don't want it shoved down my throat. No one needs to know what I'm doing every damned minute.
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