Politics, Tech: Dear Washington Post columnists: Give Twitter credit for Iran
- What the heck, guys?
John Palfrey, Bruce Etling and Robert Faris, you guys don’t get it. You just don’t. A lengthy response to the Twitter protest tool phenomenon is not the way to go.
You tore it apart for the very reasons it’s useful, such as its brevity (the revolution will not be in speech form), the fact that lots of people use it and create a glut of information (much of which is retweets), and the fact that dissenters on both sides can use it.
You have one moderately valid point: The government can block the access. Good thing they’re using proxy servers!
- A bad example
Here’s the real reason why you really don’t get it – you credited Andrew Sullivan for creating the hype around the protests, rather than the protesters themselves.
We’d like to use the example of @iranriggedelect. We were an early follower of the great resource, and we recommended them when they had three followers. Now they have 10,000+.
And of course, Twitter had to nudge CNN. Face it – Twitter isn’t people just talking. It’s media. And this media works differently.
Please figure out why. source