Twitterverse working to confuse Iranian censors
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.
Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel. 
I think the Iranian government is finding out how hard it is to un-ring a bell. The light of freedom gets into a lot of dark corners and exposes evil for what it is.
The twitter profiles being sought by the Iranian government reside on Twitter's servers, all of which are located outside of Iran. Same for the profiles of anyone else using Twitter. So yes, changing your twitter profile to Tehran timezone could indeed confuse Iranian censors, as it increases the amount of information they have to sift thru to find identifiable information about people tweeting from inside Iran.
I dont see how twitting can confuse OR help. The military in Iran Im sure can track the computers in Iran. These twitters or whatever you call them in Iran, are only following in the footsteps of many Americans, who have fought and died to start this Revolution we call Freedom.
Reporters and information passers recording history that we Americans so quickly forget think we can fight all the fights in the world. LETS START WORRYING ABOUT US, Yes The U.S.
The importance of Twitter with regards to the events in Iran is undeniable. We have yet to understand its full impact. However, the amount of misinformation, unconfirmed rumors, urban myths being propagated at the speed of "RT" is equally astounding - and potentially dangerous.
HSB
I'm erring on the side of "it takes no time to switch my profile and send out a few tweets with tagwords in them."
Still researching if it's actually helping. I don't have a gun, I'm not there, and people aren't shooting at me so I figure it's the least I can do, just in case it actually helps.
- by qmslager2 June 23, 2009 9:13 PM PDT
- Changing the time and place has at least two benefit as ***** (government tweets) are trying to connect to updaters through twitter. They are creating false twitter pages with the purpose to scam reformists into divulging their location or name. Obviously that is a sign that despite their famed technology somehow twitter is escaping them. When they try to sift through iran elections or any other trending topic they have to sift through hundreds with tehran as their home, which means it will slow the process of them sending misinformation. Second to this is the Basij who are using twitter pages directly to root out active techs and attack them. It allows for a more anonymous nature to your twittering. More importantly since the government is controlling bandwidth right now, many World citizens have created proxy sites allowing for Iranians in Iran to escape the government controls. the only way to catch these people is to data mine using search words in social sites and by giving your address as Tehran they have another person they have to sift through. The government may be using deep packet search features but those can be easily subverted by proxies or old fashioned pig latin, so they are still relying on data sifters to search through social sites
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