Webware

When Twitter rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval, it was at the request of the U.S. State Department, according to CNN.

This should not be taken to mean that the U.S. is attempting to get involved at this point, CNN added. The State Department is working with multiple social-networking and communication services to ensure that conversation and information channels stay active.

"By necessity, the U.S. is staying hands-off of the election drama playing out in Iran, and officials say they are not providing messages to Iranians or 'quarterbacking' the disputed election process," the article by CNN's Elise Labott read.

Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, information gathered on the Web is crucial to its understanding of the post-election unrest that has led to mass protests and fatal clashes with police. Twitter, where users have been filtering relevant information with the hashtag #iranelection, has been a crucial hotspot for raw news.

Twitter's planned maintenance, according to a post on the company's official blog, was selected by its hosting partner, NTT America. The update is "a critical network upgrade [that] must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter," however, so it will instead take place this afternoon when it's well after midnight in Iran.

Meanwhile, in a sort of digital twist on that famous scene in The Thomas Crowne Affair, a new viral campaign is going around Twitter: Users from around the world are resetting the location data in their profiles to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in order to confuse Iranian authorities who may be attempting to use the microblogging tool to track down opposition activity.

Twitter users are urging each other to change their location settings to confuse censors in Iran.

(Credit: Twitter)

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a reader who had seen my story about Twitter users slamming CNN for its initial absence on the post-Iranian election protests, urging me to remove an image in the story.

The rationale? The image was of Twitter results and included users' account IDs, and the reader was worried that the Iranian government might seek out and punish any users who were employing Twitter for potentially subversive purposes.

We decided not to remove the image, in part because it had been up for more than 24 hours, and also because we suspected that the Iranian government knows how to use Twitter and how to find people in that country using the microblogging service as a way to spread news about the protests.

But now, Twitter users across the world are attempting to turn that dynamic on its head. The best way that the Iranian government could discover which tweets were from Iranians is to look and see whose accounts are registered to people who identify themselves as being from that country. That's possible because users' profiles allow people to define which city they're from and which time zone they're in.

There's a new thread spreading quickly across Twitter--I found more than 1,300 such posts--urging people around the world to change those settings in order to make themselves appear to be in Tehran.

Under the profile setting, the plea goes, people should change their location to Tehran, and their time zone and home city to GMT +03:30 Tehran. The idea--and it's not entirely clear if this would work--is that this will simply overwhelm the censors with people who look like they're posting potentially subversive tweets from Iran, and hopefully, protect the actual Iranians who are doing so.

Twitter, of course--as well as other social media services, has been the front line for news about the massive protests--perhaps the biggest in Iran since the revolution in 1979 that toppled the Shah. The service's users--using the hashtag "#IranElection"--have consistently been ahead of the news media on the story. And Twitter convinced its host, NTT America, to delay scheduled downtime in order to keep the service up and running so as to continue to give users a way to spread and receive news about what's going on in Iran.

The question has come up, again and again, about what would have happened in China in 1989 if protesters in Tiananmen Square had had Twitter at their disposal. I think China is more adept at censorship than Iran, but it seems clear that where there's a will, there's a way. And users of the Internet are a lot more clever than bureaucratic censors. I think the word would have gotten out.

Twitter's host NTT America is postponing the downtime that was scheduled to take place late Monday night in light of all of the Twitter activity surrounding the presidential elections in Iran.

A post by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on Twitter's blog says that the maintenance will instead take place on Tuesday from 2 to 3 p.m. PST, which will be in the early morning (1:30 a.m.) for Iranian users. Stone went on to say: "Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide--we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation."

Iran and its controversial presidential election results continue to be the top-trending topics on Twitter. Over the weekend the service played a large role in the spread of information not only about election results, but in the aftermath that followed.

While word of riots in the streets of Tehran spread like wildfire on Twitter, CNN stayed largely silent on the story, surprising and dismaying many.

(Credit: Twitter)

As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran--thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities--an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: "CNNFail."

Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

For most of Saturday, CNN.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was reported by the Iranian government to have lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The widespread street clashes--nearly unheard of in the tightly controlled Iran--reflected popular belief that the election had been rigged, a sentiment that was even echoed, to some extent, by the U.S. government Saturday.

"The Obama administration is determined to press on with efforts to engage the Iranian government," The New York Times cited senior officials as having said Saturday, "despite misgivings about irregularities in the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Yet even as word of the urban strife, seemingly led by those posting to Twitter, spread next around the world on news networks like the BBC, NPR, and the Times, CNN remained mostly mute. Even when the network's Internet site finally posted a story late Saturday, the network's first "story highlight" was, "Ahmadinejad plans rally after winning second presidential term."

Increasingly, Twitter has become the go-to source for breaking news about any kind of notable event, be it an earthquake, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, or post-election riots in Tehran. Yet many Twitter users found CNN's lack of attention to what could end up being one of the biggest stories in years appalling.

"CNN just loops the same stories endlessly, while ignoring the biggest story," posted Twitter user MediaButcher.

"CNN needs to talk about the important things like Ms. California and who Paris Hilton is (sleeping with)," wrote Twitter user ArchivalQuality.

Others used the opportunity to applaud the work of other networks while indirectly criticizing CNN. "Might I point out to all of those tracking #CNNFail that there's a corresponding #NPRWin good coverage @ www.npr.org," opined Twitter user Nickbernstein, referring to the Twitter convention of using "hashtags," or pound-signs before keywords to indicate Twitter search terms, in this case a reference to the suggestion that NPR had done a good job covering the Iranian riots.

And it wasn't long before word of CNN's theoretical reporting failure began to make its way into more established media. Under the headline, "Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran," the popular blog ReadWriteWeb blasted the network for its failure to cover the clearly massive story in the Middle East.

"Hours after Iranian police began clashing with tens of thousands of people in the street," ReadWriteWeb wrote late Saturday night, "the top story on CNN.com remains peoples' confusion about the switch from analog TV signals."

It's odd that CNN would be so late to this story, especially given the criticism it's getting from the Twitterverse, and given how clued in the network is supposed to be to Twitter. It was, after all, only two months ago that CNN's Twitter account barely missed out--to actor Ashton Kutcher--on being the first to accumulate a million followers.

One would think, then, that when the idea began to percolate around Twitter that CNN was missing out on a major, historical story like the one developing in Iran, the network would have noted the discontent and done something about it.

But even as the sun prepared to rise in the eastern United States, CNN's Web site was still focusing on Ahmadinejad's victory and not the fact that massive riots in the streets of Tehran might be a world-changing moment, potentially on par with the failed 1991 coup in the Soviet Union that led to the collapse of the authoritarian government there.

To be sure, it's too early to tell if the events unfolding in Terhan will have such a lasting effect. But in Iran, there haven't been such vivid pictures of popular anger at the government since the revolution there in 1979 that toppled the Shah and led to the current religious fundamentalist leadership.

And to the thousands on Twitter posting to the #CNNFail thread, this story should be a no-brainer for the network that managed to have the only reporters on the ground when the United States began bombing Baghdad in 1991 at the beginning of the Gulf War.