As some Americans acclaimed the "Twitter revolution" in Iran, the role of social networking web sites such as Twitter and Facebook has been debated in the United States.
Twitter, a social networking web site based in the U.S., has played an important role in communication in Iran when many Iranians went to the streets to protest the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadjnejad as the country's president.
Taking it as a critical tool for Iranians to communicate, the U.S. government has intended to influence the situation in Iran by allowing Twitter to play a more important role there.
The U.S. State Department made an unusual move to openly ask Twitter to delay its scheduled maintenance.
"One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter," a senior State Department official said in a conversation with reporters.
"This wasn't a directive from Secretary of State, but rather was a low-level contact from someone who often talks to Twitter staff," a White House official was also quoted by the media as saying.
But the official disclosed that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also tweeted. "Twitter is simply a medium that all Iranians can use to communicate," the official said.
Twitter allows people to share, or "tweet" with others what they are doing at any given moment with a message in 140 characters or fewer.
When people sign up with Twitter, they can use the service to post and receive messages to a network of contacts. Instead of sending a dozen e-mails or text messages, they send one message to their Twitter account, and the service distributes it to all their friends.
It has become very popular among young Americans. Some universities use Twitter as a communication medium to post notices and spread other information. Some people use Twitter to organize impromptu gatherings, carry on a group conversation or just send a quick update to let people know what's going on.
Politicians have also started to use Twitter and other social networking web sites such as FaceBook and Myspace to get support during election campaigns.
However, it is the first time that the U.S. government openly asked a private owned social networking web site to play a role in international affairs.
An Iranian-American activist in Washington said since foreign reporters' movement has been limited in Iran, "they are relying on Iranians and others who are Twittering to get this information out to the mainstream media. A lot of people are coining what is happening in Iran as a Twitter revolution."
However, some do not agree with the U.S. government's points on Twitter.
Mehdi Yahvanejad, manager of a Farsi language news site based in Los Angeles, said Twitter's impact inside Iran is zero.
"Here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look . . . you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves," said Yahvanejad.
Some others questioned how much twittering is actually going on inside Iran. They said the tweets circulated by expatriates in the U.S. tend to be in English, because the Twitter interface does not support the use of Farsi. That makes Iranians difficult to post their messages over Twitter.
They said though many people may be sending tweets out of Iran, their use inside Iran may be low.
Actually anyone can put messages over Twitter. The information spread over Twitter could be fact, and could also be exaggerated or fabricated.
Joshua Kucera raises the question about the reliability of information from Twitter and other social networking web sites in his blog.
He said some of the things Americans have learned about the Iranian elections and aftermath are confusing, such as "Three million people protested in Tehran," "The losing candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was put under house arrest," and "The president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid on Saturday."
He said these are just a handful of data points that have been shooting around the Internet via Twitter, and all have been instrumental in building a public opinion case against the Iranian government for undercounting the support for Mousavi.
But there is a problem because none of them appear any longer to be true, he said.
He said the crowd was in the hundreds of thousands, most newspapers reported, not three million, at least there is no source to prove that besides Twitter.
Mousavi's wife said he was not under house arrest Sunday but he appeared in person at the protest on Monday. No serious reporter has reported that the president of the election monitoring commission has gone over to the opposition.
Kucera questioned whether Twitter is causing or encouraging unrest in Iran, instead of relaying information about it.
Source:Xinhua
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