Liberation Technology: Revolution by Tweet – by Noushin Darya Framke

My husband says he hates Twitter, but only because he didn’t think of it first. He says it is such a simple application that he kicks himself for not thinking people would actually want to tell the whole world what they are doing at any given moment. In September 2008, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Twitter and how people were hooked on knowing what strangers across the country were up to. We both read the article and opened Twitter accounts, thinking “this is stupid, but we’ll open an account and see what comes of it.” Nothing came of it, for us anyway, until ten months later during the Iranian presidential election of June 2009.

I have been in the U.S. for 33 years now, and a U.S. citizen for 25. Originally from Iran and having family there, I try to keep up with what is going on over there, despite George W. Bush putting it in the “axis of evil.” I had actually been in Iran in the winter of 2009 to visit family and was aware that the upcoming election was not really grabbing most people’s attention because people just didn’t believe in change coming to Iran that way. As Election Day approached, however, the opposition gathered steam and made a run for ousting Ahmadinejad, and “The Green Movement” was born. Using the bold green color representing direct descendents of the Prophet Mohammed, the opposition functioned within an Islamic framework and had two candidates already approved to run for president. The amount of support they both garnered surprised people not only in Washington but in Iran, too. And their success had a lot to do with Twitter. So much so that the U.S. State Department stepped in and asked Twitter to refrain from taking its site off-line for maintenance work during the week following the contested election results, so as to empower the dissenting voices in Iran.

I found myself desperately searching for information that was valid and up-to-date. The mainstream media was hopelessly out of the loop, since Iran had only let a few foreign reporters in, and given them visas to stay for up to a week. Roger Cohen of the NY Times was one of the few there and he reported stories until he had to leave. It was hard to know what to believe coming out of Iran and who to trust. The Western reporters there were new to the culture and from what I could see, were scrambling to cover the story. That’s when I turned to Twitter. Even though I had no idea how to “use” twitter, I logged in to my dormant account and started looking around. Before long, the information started flowing, and then it was a torrent flooding to my laptop. I noticed that people were asking everyone to put a green ribbon on their avatar (profile image) and/or color their avatar green to show solidarity with the protestors in Iran. There was also a movement to change your profile to say your location was “Iran” to confuse the government censors there who were trying to shut down tweets out of Iran. Before long, there were literally millions of users with green avatars “located” in Iran.

Iran is 8.5 hours ahead of New York, so I found myself up through the night, night after night, trying to keep up with what was happening in the streets there. Thousands of people had smart phones with video capability and were posting footage on YouTube and putting links to them on Twitter. Persian speakers like myself were combing Twitter to find substance out of what was sometimes thousands of posts a minute. Of course, no one could keep up with all of it, but I did my share of translating chants and signs in the streets and reposting on Twitter with translations. Many times, I would see the video clip on CNN about 20 minutes later, with my translations. By the second and third weeks, most of the mainstream media had Persian-speakers on hand, but those first few days, the Twitter community that had formed and vetted facts from fiction had the most up-to-date information out there. We even had a vetting process for who to trust and who was a government “troll.” Emotional tweets poured out, and I wept uncontrollably when a tweet led me to a video of Joan Baez singing We Shall Overcome in Persian.  The conversation on Twitter created a community, which still exists today, consisting of those I follow and those who follow me; we got to know each other through that contested election in Iran. This particular community is all over the world; I have “tweet pals” from Australia and China to England and Denmark, to all over the Americas. My presence on Twitter became part of my daily routine as my tweets made me a specific kind of twitter user: a trusted information hub.

By the time The Egyptian Revolution was using Twitter for dissent leading up to the events in Tahrir (Liberation) Square and Mubarak’s resignation on February 11, 2011, I was an old hand at how to find information on uprisings. You could say I was a savvy cog in the Liberation Technology wheel. Much has been written about the Arab Spring and how it has shown the West a side of the Arab World that was unknown to us. There was surprise expressed that Al Qaeda elements were not chanting anti-American slogans in the streets of the Arab world and burning American Flags. This can be explained by the fact that most Americans get their information on the Arab world through the mainstream media of broadcast and print news who saw things through a different lens. Ramzy Baroud writes on Counterpunch.org that “Arabs are not unified by the narratives of al-Qaida or the U.S. They are united by other factors that often escape Western commentators and officials. Aside from shared histories, religions, language and a collective sense of belonging, they also have in common their experiences of oppression, alienation, injustice and inequality.” And that is what poured out of the protestors.

This all-important common denominator came through loud and clear in the tweets from Tahrir Square as well as other uprisings in the Arab world. The story of the Egyptian Revolution, as posted on Twitter, was collected and published in a book called Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made it. Actually, many journalists and commentators in the mainstream media have now joined The Liberation Technology Movement by posting on Twitter. In June 2011, ForeignPolicy.com published the The FP Twitterati 100: A Who’s Who of the foreign policy Twitterverse. Not surprisingly, some are more “liberation” oriented than others.

For my money, the prize for best use of social media goes to the women of Saudi Arabia and the “Saudi Rosa Parks” who organized and mobilized a protest and pressed Hilary Clinton to endorse their right to drive. The big news there is that the brave new world of liberation technology built enough pressure to push the octogenarian Saudi Monarch to finally grant women the right to vote this week. As the New York Times reports, “Some women wondered aloud how they would be able to campaign for office when they were not even allowed to drive.” Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bars women from getting behind the wheel of a vehicle – bicycles included – but the ball of change has started rolling.

With the advent of new technology and “revolution by tweets,” the role of a Thomas Payne or a Robespierre has been diluted and the power of organizing has now spread out, but it is still undeniable that people make revolutions, not technology. Dictators and diplomats were out-organized and out-maneuvered by groups of tech-savvy people turned-activists when their online conversations turned them into a powerful community. Facebook, SMS texting and Twitter led to mobilization of large numbers of people into the streets, who now had a new weapon in an old fight.

It must be noted, however, that this new weapon can be a double-edge sword. In the wake of the failed Green Movement in Iran, the government posted pictures of “Twitterati” and used crowd-sourcing to identify the dissenters – a very East German, Stasi-like use of people against people. China spends a lot of resources on surveillance, but so far, the targets are mostly known dissidents. A phenomenon that has come to be known as “the dictator’s dilemma” has come about, where a digital public space is not easy to shut off if it is used for both social justice organizing and the country’s economy. When Egypt’s leaders found the “Off” switch for the Internet, the blackout was lifted after just five days because as the New York Times reported, “they found the government’s attack left Egypt not only cut off from the outside world, but also with its internal systems in a sort of comatose state… the shutdown in Egypt did not appear to have diminished the protests — if anything, it inflamed them …[and] it would cost untold millions of dollars in lost business and investor confidence in the country.”

Much has been said about this new digital public space and whether it is an Internet utopia or dystopia.  Since the Internet is merely a tool, just as the printing press was, it is safe to say that it can lead to both. A perfect example is how social media, which functions at times like a community bulletin board, was a key factor in the “spontaneous” riots that erupted in London in August 2011. On the other hand, Eric Schmidt of Google speaking at the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, said: “It’s a mistake to look in the mirror and decide to break the mirror. The fact of the matter is… whatever the underlying problem was, the Internet is a reflection of that problem, but turning off the Internet is not going to fix it. You better fix whatever the underlying problem was.” In fact, community groups were organized on Facebook and Twitter to come out with brooms, buckets and rubber gloves to clean up the mess created by the riots all over the U.K. The Financial Times reported that “Twitter users united for riot cleanup… and with aid from several prominent users, groups of people took to the streets of Hackney, Peckham and Liverpool to sweep streets and clean burnt-out shops.”

This month Palestine has joined the Arab Awakening with a bid for statehood at the United Nations, putting the U.S. in an awkward position. With the Obama administration finally throwing its support to the people in the Arab street, it is hard to explain why they will not support the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination. Our double-standard was laid-bare for the world to see at the United Nations when President Obama contradicted his own speech from a year ago, and allowed domestic politics to take precedence over the long-awaited two-state solution.

Liberation technology has also come to American politics. As reported in The Daily Beast, a new group called Americans Elect has launched an Internet presidential race for the 2012 election. “It’s old-school democracy married to modern technology,” says John Avlon of The Daily Beast, and “Like Egypt’s leaderless Facebook revolution, this is a movement without a candidate, happy to create a platform via wiki [collaboratively via community].” The idea is to create a framework for a viable third party with a nominee chosen directly on the Internet. If this Internet candidate is not a factor in the 2012 Presidential race, it surely will be in the 2016 race.

Twitter and social media have already secured a top spot in the annals of history thanks to the sheer jubilation they have brought to the hearts and minds of activists around the world. Like at any other time in history, the best part about an advance in the dissemination of information is that it’s irreversible: We can’t reverse literacy spreading from church scribes to the masses, we can’t reverse the desire of the masses to read newspapers and books after Guttenberg, and now, we can’t reverse the need for connectivity of the smart-phone generation. The question that remains is whether this powerful new tool of liberation technology will actually be “informed and always informing” or will it be squandered on cute cat pictures and gimmicky videos? I’m willing to bet it will pay big dividends; the best is yet to come. Pull up a front row seat!

Extras:

• Who uses social media?
  See Pew Research here.

• Social networking sites and their impact on our lives
  See Pew Research here

• Presbyterian Today Cover Story
  High tech, high touch: Finding the balance – Churches are embracing the gift of technology. But Facebook and email can’t always substitute for face-to-face communication. See here

• Conversation on “liberation technology”
  at the NExTWORK Conference 2011
  Google’s Jared Cohen on The Engine of Freedom
  Quote: “In the future it’s going to be easier and faster to start a revolution but it’s going to be just as hard to finish one…to stage a meaningful and successful revolution.”

• Growth of Social Media infographics (click on graph to zoom in)