To Tweet or Not to Tweet? That Would Be My Internal Struggle If I Was Iranian…

As if being in the middle of a bloody, tumultuous political uprising isn’t bad enough, where wearing the wrong color can get you bludgeoned and through in a ditch! The SNS Twitter has reinvented the idea of activism, as a result of Iranian citizen tweets on up-to-date rallies, beatings, death’s and marches in uproarious Tehran. There has been public outpouring of support and interest as a result of Iranian citizen tweets. Even media outlets have begun to read Iranian citizen tweets as a means of remaining connected to Iran.



But for all it’s praise and glorification, I haven’t seen anyone stand back and examine the potential problems that can arise from tweeting activism in the middle of a political uprising… until I read “The Tragic Pitfall of Iranian Citizen Journalism” in the Huffington Post.



Iranian tweeters have used the internet to expose what’s going on in their country…But haven’t they also exposed themselves? The Huffington Post article raises an alarming theory—that internet activism has consummated the marriage of censorship and surveillance. Previously informants had to infiltrate a group, be microphones, have secret cameras, know about face to face meetings and understand code to be able to spy on people that were considered dissenters or threats. Now? A search of ‘sensitive words’ is done through the internet on SNS, emails, search engines, etc and logged in a database for investigation. What does this mean for the Iranian election citizen journalist tweets? Why has te government not been able to stop them from tweeting? Well first, this means that somewhere there is a database compiled of ‘sensitive words’ that can eventually be traced (fairly easily) to a location, time, and person. Yep, there’s no anonymity on the internet folks. You. Can. Be. Found. Next, besides the obvious fact that Iran would want to keep news of their uprising within their means of interpretation for public dissemination, these tweets are convenient for them. This cuts out the work and the middle man and has left these citizen journalists marked…For what?... I’m sure we’ll be reading tweets about this soon, as it dominoes through the Iranian tweeter activists…