Talk Touts Twitter’s News Value

The role digital communication played in this summer’s Green Movement in Iran suggests that tools like Twitter will increasingly acquire a pivotal role in breaking news reporting, said speakers at a talk hosted yesterday by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

“There is a real potential to build a global movement around digital freedom,” said Brett Solomon, a speaker at the event who serves as a campaign director at online human rights group Avaaz.org and as executive director of the political Web site GetUp.org.au.

Solomon and Cameran Ashraf, an adjunct faculty member at California State University, Pomona, discussed how Twitter updates were able to increase communication.

Ashraf mentioned the example of demonstrators involved with Iran’s Green Movement, which sought last summer to overturn election results that many viewed as potentially fraudulent.

According to Ashraf, after people began protesting the election results, the government drastically limited Internet speeds.

But Twitter, which allows its users to post 140 character status updates, provided a fast outlet for information transfer.

The technology helped organizers continue the protests despite the government’s efforts to curtail digital communication.

As Twitter users “tweeted” updates on the situation in Iran, such as how the government was trying to quell the protests, American networks like CNN also began relying on Twitter as a source for information, Ashraf said.

Over 480,000 Twitter users participated in spreading information about the status of post-election Iran, Ashraf said.

Ashraf praised digital media’s ability to unite such a broad group of people.

“It brought digital activists together who didn’t know each other but who had a common interest,” he said. “The Green Movement took a hydra-like approach to this, which is brilliant—everybody was a leader.”

But Ashraf did express frustration at the international response to the Green Movement.

Public attention transitioned rapidly from intense interest to apparent indifference immediately after news broke of the death of pop star Michael Jackson.