:: Shekhar Bhatia

Twittering a revolution

Shekhar Bhatia

June.19 : What do the recent elections in the US, India and Iran have in common?

I don’t mean a group of enthusiastic first-time voters in Mumbai shouting "yes, we can", or a presidential contender in Iran adopting "change" as his election slogan. Or the wife of the key challenger, Mir Hussein Mousavi, being called "Iran’s Michelle Obama".

The thread that runs through the three elections is the use of the Internet to woo voters. US President Barack Obama set the trend. In India, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ran an aggressive online campaign. That it lost could be more to do with the message than the medium. And in Iran, Mr Mousavi used the Internet extensively during his campaign. It is "like the Air Force in a military campaign", he said. "It bombards the enemy’s positions and lays the groundwork for the infantry, our volunteers, so that they can win battles on the ground".

Mr Mousavi’s wife Zahra Rahnavard is an eminent professor in a university and played a significant role in her husband’s campaign. Together, they inspired Iranians with their message of reform. Now their supporters are angry because they say President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has rigged the election. And now their protest has spilled on to the streets.

When the Iranian government put restrictions on foreign media and blocked cellphones, Mr Mousavi’s supporters switched to Twitter, a micro-blogging site, to bypass the censors and reach out to the world. For a minute-by-minute account of the scene in Tehran, follow some Twitter streams: You will get news, information and, of course, rumours. "Attacked in streets by mob on motorbikes with batons — firing guns into air", tweeted Persiankiwi, whose feed is being followed by most media in the West.

Twitter is fast, free and can easily be accessed from a cellphone or a computer. You "tweet" about whatever is on your mind, but limit it to 140 characters or less. You can follow someone’s tweet, or they can follow yours. Instead of sending text messages to your friends to find out if they are game for an evening out, you send out just one tweet.

But this is not Twitter’s first claim to fame. It was during the Mumbai terrorist attacks that this social networking tool was first used in a breaking-story situation. I still remember one tweet: "Hospital update. Shots still being fired. Also, Metro cinema next door". Considering the proximity of the hospital and the cinema to the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station where the terrorists first struck, this bit of news must have gone up on Twitter within an hour of the first shot being fired. For the next three days, blogs and Twitter were buzzing with eyewitness accounts.

If 26/11 was "a watershed moment" for Twitter, Iran is being dubbed as Twitter’s "coming-out party", its "finest hour".

The use of Twitter in Iran, however, raises two larger questions: One is about Internet-based activism. To put it simply, can Twitter be a tool to defeat tyranny? And two, is there a lesson here for the mainstream media? Is Twitter a threat to newspapers?

Let me answer the second question first: Two days after the Iran election results, some of Mr Mousavi’s supporters thought CNN’s coverage was inadequate and did not reflect the mood of the people. So they set up a Twitter stream called "CNNfail". Though the cable news network defended its position, it was forced to step up coverage of this story.

Whether a terrorist attack in Mumbai or street protests in Tehran, you need coverage of two sides of the story to provide some perspective — be it in a newspaper or on a TV channel. My point is that staccato bursts of information such as on Twitter or videos on YouTube can complement mainstream media, but cannot replace it completely. Not as yet. However, given the media censorship in Iran, there is no doubt that without Twitter and YouTube it would have been impossible to assess the extent of the peoples’ anger.

As for the question of Internet as an activist’s tool, we would have had our answer had Twitter been around when Tiananmen Square happened in 1989. But Twitter is just about four-years-old. Whether YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, these sites are essentially about transparency, openness and freedom of expression — concepts that go against the grain of totalitarian regimes

In fact, the Harvard Law School has set up an Internet and Democracy Project to examine "how the Internet influences democratic norms and modes, including its impact on civil society, citizen media, government transparency..." In a unique exercise the project team monitored Iranian blogs and noticed that "Mr Mousavi has broader support in the online blog community than Ahmadinejad".

The team cautioned against predicting a Mousavi victory just on this analysis, but his supporters can well interpret this as another proof that the election was rigged. The Harvard project is an example of using the Internet as a political barometer.

I have no idea what will happen in Iran. At the time of writing this column the country’s powerful Guardian Council had agreed to a recount of the disputed votes. But if this does not satisfy the protesters, will there be a re-vote? A crackdown on Mr Mousavi supporters?

Whichever turn it takes, the Iran story would have proved one thing: that Twitter can certainly be used to organise dissent, support and action. If nothing else, it can at least embarrass the power-hungry rulers and put them on the defensive.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com