Stephen's Untold Stories

I’ve posted a couple of times recently about how I’ve finally started to “get” Twitter. Here is yet another reason I’m really starting to love this tool.

If you aren’t on twitter, you really should be. Not because it allows you to keep up with the daily goings-on of Khloe Kardashian (although it does!), but because we are seeing for the first time what happens when a government that needs to control information to survive can’t control information. Iranians are using twitter to organize, to share information, and even to discuss which routes to take to rallies to avoid confrontations with the police. Although foreign journalists have mostly been kicked out of Iran, we’re still able to get pictures like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this.

The regime has more sophisticated ways of stopping the flow of information, but so far at least the Iranians on twitter have stayed remarkably organized, and they’ve found ways to vet information. When false rumors have spread, they’ve been quickly debunked.

So, yeah. Twitter is not about what you had for breakfast, or Khloe Kardashian, or me. It’s about evening the playing field.

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