Debunking a few myths about the Twitter revolution

Malcom Gladwell debunks a few myths about the role of Twitter during the iranian revolution. Simply put, there was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West

“It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

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Quite a change of tune from the earlier articles praising twitter's role during the protest, and probably much closer to the truth. The course of events is still subject to a lot of debate, all the way to Wikipedia whose article on the matter sees its neutrality disputed.

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