Protests, Revolutions and Other Loud Noises
At the beginning of the movie The Longest Day, the Germans have broken an important code the Allies use to communicate with the French Resistance. At least they think they have. They believe that when a line from a particular poem is read on the radio, it will be the signal that the invasion of France (D-Day) is imminent. They don’t know what the French resistance fighters are supposed to do about it, where it will happen or much of anything else, but they will at least know the time with possibly as much as several hours of warning.
It’s possible that the message carries information about specific assignments or even where to find further instructions. The movie (one of those rare masterpieces, by the way, that may be more interesting just to listen to, than to watch) does not go into detail about the communications network that put these codes in place, or the people who were imprisoned, tortured or murdered by the Gestapo to find ways to weld the scattered cells into a guerilla army that could be set in motion so well at the required time.
That brief scene, though, and others, such as the one where resistance members hear the coded signal, should help teach us something that’s been missing from the commentary about the really interesting role of Twitter in the protests in Iran this week. That lesson is that spontaneous revolutions are not just uncommon, they are almost impossible in a modern police state.
The short version of what’s happening: There was an election in Iran that many people viewed as rigged. Rather than accept the result, supporters of the main opposition candidate protested. There have been huge rallies in the streets around Iran for days now. There have also been reports of the government shooting at protesters, beating them up, dragging them (or people suspected of supporting them) out of their homes (or their dorms, in many cases). There was even one report of an official killed in a “suspicious car accident“, the implication being that he was unofficially murdered by the government.
Meanwhile, Twitter has emerged as an important source of news from inside Iran with activity sometimes hitting the level of thousands of Tweets per minute. As of this writing (Saturday afternoon, June 20, 2009) the #iranelection tag is still the number one trending topic on Twitter. A glance at the Internet/Twitter aspect of the situation:
- Some information on Twitter has come from inside Iran. Some has been in support, some against, some real, some false.
- At one point there were many Tweets and re-tweets about how to contribute to distributed denial of service and other attacks on government sites in Iran (See here and here).
- The Iranian government has tried to block access to Twitter and similarly subversive sites, but that actually began before the election. See for example here.
- Twitter delayed scheduled maintenance so as not to interfere with the Internet arm of these election protests. Reportedly, this was at a request from inside the U.S. State Department.
One other notable response to the huge Internet presence of the Iranian protests was Facebook’s very fast rollout of a Farsi language version of its service. This could be seen as a sincere attempt to give the protesters a platform that can help them organize and communicate. It could also be a very cynical attempt to exploit the situation for growth, or merely a realization that a previously overlooked market is bigger than previously thought. Personally, I think it’s a mixture of all of the above.
This brings us to the point where I point out that almost all of the analysis I’ve seen of Twitter and the Iranian election protests has been wrong (Except for this excellent piece here). We may or may not be witnessing a real revolution in Iran. If the government succeeds in putting down the unrest, the resentments that fostered it will not disappear, they will go underground. That’s the way totalitarian governments like it. They believe that the majority of people just sort of follow the herd and if the only herd that’s not in prison is run by the government, that’s the one they’ll follow.
Where the discussions of the Internet’s role in general and Twitter’s in particular go wrong is in acting as if the volume of traffic is an indicator of its importance. It is not. It’s an indicator of passion. Twitter can help organize protests by broadcasting their timing and location to anyone who has a phone or a web browser. That “everyone” includes the government and the counter-protesters as well. This is a crucial point: It’s much less demanding technically to run a search on Twitter to find out where to send the goons to greet the next big protest than to tap the phones of a few thousand known dissenters and follow them.
Likewise, if you want to infiltrate a revolution, setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter profile loaded with false subversive messages to establish credibility is much easier than spending months or years living a fake life, trying to finagle an introduction to a friend of a friend of a friend who might be involved in the resistance (or might also turn out to be working for the Secret Police). Some of the old KGB informers must be turning green in their graves (pun not intended) with envy at the ease of it all.
This is the point I was trying to make with the reference to The Longest Day, above: That real revolutions tend to take years of quiet and hideously dangerous organization to build. They don’t happen because a bunch of people on Twitter all say, “I don’t like this government. Let’s overthrow it!” In a country like Iran, someone who puts up a message like that runs the risk of a severe beating, imprisonment or death if the government comes to believe they mean it.
That’s why the resistance in The Longest Day (and even in real life!) consisted of small groups of people who did not know each other or even respond to the same codes. When the government tortures someone into betraying the revolution, if they only know 3 other people who are involved, that’s all the people the revolution will lose. If they have a hundred thousand Twitter followers, the potential loss is much greater. And the government will quickly figure out that it doesn’t have to kill all 100,000 of that person’s Twitter followers. It only has to kill the ones of those who have the most followers. The top of the food chain is easy to find when easily available software can graph an online social network in a few moments. See for example Twitter Friends.
My guess is, therefore, that if Iran has any smart people who really want a revolution, those people aren’t using Twitter or Facebook to draw attention to themselves. Popular unrest can be a powerful force. So, unfortunately, is the stubbornness of a violent and autocratic government. It’s possible that the current unrest will gain some concessions from the government. It’s very unlikely the government will fall (though I wouldn’t rule it out). Twitter and the Internet in general help give the people a voice to raise up against oppression and that’s important. But it’s not a revolution and can even get in the way of one. Think about that.
Update 6/27/2009
It seems others are beginning to understand the double-edged nature of the sword of Internet-enabled revolution. Via Slashdot, we find a Wall Street Journal story about high tech used to fight the revolution (read it here. It’s interesting) and a Slate.com article describing ways the government of Iran is using Internet technology to break up the protests and identify protesters (here).
Nice to see the media starting to catch on, finally.
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