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I recently appeared on BBC’s World Have Your Say talk show on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’.

I talked about why we should distrust all information on Twitter, especially in Iran where only Mousavi supporters are represented on the service. I also talked about why the term Twitter Revolution is already a cliche, after Moldova and Iran.

Here’s the full text of the BBC blog post about the talk show –

Who do you trust to tell you what’s happening in Iran ?

The true and undisputed winners of the Iranian elections have emerged - Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and You Tube have been bathing in the limelight. Here’s the BBC’s breakdown on social media in Iran. The Iranian government’s blocking of traditional media outlets has meant that microblogging has been our main source of information.

Microblogging of course cannot always be verified. So, have the events in Iran just been exaggerated or has our access to social media been a valuable insight to what’s really happening on the ground?

I was recently quoted in AJC in a story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ –

Some, however, think the importance of Twitter is being overblown. Among them is social media blogger Gaurav Mishra. He wrote last week that the actual number of Twitter users in Iran was small, and that Twitter reports, rather than being an organizing tool for the protesters, mainly helped focus international media attention on the protests.

I have previously written about why the term Twitter Revolution is already a cliche, after Moldova and Iran.

Here is the full text of the story –

‘Net effect: Social media aid uprising

Staff and news services

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Media control

Iran’s government controls its traditional media: newspapers, radio and television. Atop the government are the Islamic clerics of the Guardian Council and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, who supports incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The government also controls access to the country by foreign media.

As the presidential campaign unfolded, supporters of reform candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi turned to Internet-driven social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr to get out their messages and to organize. Ahmadinejad was considered a prohibitive favorite for re-election, but as polls showed Mousavi gaining support, the government temporarily shut down access to the social networking sites.

I was recently interviewed by Elisabeth Eaves at Forbes on a story on why there is no ‘Twitter Revolution’ in Iran –

In Iran, too, Twitter is probably much less useful as an initial planning tool than are private channels like e-mail, text messaging and voice telephone calls. The social media site certainly doesn’t account for getting everyone into the streets–going into the election there were only about 10,000 Iranian Twitter users, by Mishra’s estimate, whereas since then hundreds of thousands of people have protested each day.

What Twitter and Facebook can do is spread information to large groups. In any crisis, that’s important, both to the participants and to the outside world. But what is the true value of Iranian tweets? On one hand, they are more valuable than crisis tweets would be in a country with a free press, because they are one of the few sources of information the government has not found a way to control. During the terrorist attack on Mumbai hotels in 2008, plenty of Indians tweeted about the events. But, Mishra observes, “in India people were actually watching news on television, not Twitter. In Iran … social media are the only things you have.”

I recently did an interview with Worldfocus on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’. The Skype video didn’t really work, so they have posted the transcript of the interview instead.

It is a little too stream of consciousness, but capture my views on what tools like Twitter and Facebook can or cannot do in an international crisis situation like the Iran protest or the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Here is the full text of the interview –

Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” — myth or reality?

The Iranian government has restricted all journalists working for foreign news organizations from reporting on the streets of Tehran, where thousands have been gathering to protest the country’s disputed presidential election. What’s been harder to control is social media tools like Twitter, where thousands of users post and share information worldwide.

Gaurav Mishra is the co-founder of social media research and analytics company 20:20 Web Tech and a 2009 Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research. He previously taught social media at Georgetown University and co-founded Vote Report India. He joined Worldfocus to discuss the role of Twitter in the aftermath of Iran’s election.

Worldfocus: What role has Twitter played in the aftermath of Iran’s election? Has there been a “Twitter Revolution”?

(This guest post is written by Freddie Benjamin (Twitter).)

On May 20, 2009 Brave New Films (BNF) – the media firm behind Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price – stretched the limits of digital activism as it declared war on Starbucks. Its battle cry: “Twitter bombs away!”

Twitter turned into a battleground when media campaigns from BNF and Starbucks collided on the same day. Brave New Film’s newest project “Stop Starbucks” is aimed at raising awareness of Starbucks’ anti-union position and its murky past in dealing with union employees. It was a co-incidence that its YouTube launch coincided with Starbucks’ ad campaign asking people to take pictures of Starbucks posters in six major cities across the US and post them on Twitter. The very next day a post on Brave New Film’s blog urged people to take pictures of themselves in front of a Starbucks holding signs protesting Starbucks’ anti-union stance and to post them to twitter – and hence started an ‘anti-campaign’. The stand-out feature that turned this affair into a twitter-war was BNF urging people to use the same hashtags (#top3percent and #starbucks) that Starbucks had decided upon for its promotional campaign.

One of the main themes of my research on digital activism is that social technologies are value-agnostic.

At each of the four levels of Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence, social technologies can lead to both good and bad outcomes.

I have written before about Shiv Sena’s militant approach towards Orkut communities critical of the party, its leader Bal Thakeray, or its Hindutva ideology. Caste-based communities on Orkut are another disturbing example of online communities mirroring the dysfunctions in Indian society.

For instance, there are more than 1000 communities for Brahmins on Orkut. There are 461 Brahmin communities listed under culture and community, 591 under religion and beliefs, 87 under activities and 117 under others.

One of the most popular Brahmin community, with 28, 726 members, randomly claims: “we r clever & hardworking .no one can fool us…” The Brahmans community with 41952 members and the Brahmins of India community with 30588 members are also very popular. Another group, Brahmin Culture and Tradition, with 5579 members, is “dedicated to the purpose of uniting Brahmins to revive, preserve, protect and propagate the Brahmin culture to descendants without intimidation or dilution from anti-Brahminical forces.”

(This is a guest post from Naman Sarawagi (Twitter). Naman is a web 2.0 enthusiast. He has worked with Onyomo.com and Adbhai.com in the past, and now works as a copywriter at Webchutney Studios.)

ZooZoos are advertisement characters promoted by Vodafone during the Indian Premier League Season 2 (IPL). Zoozoos are white, ghost-like creatures with ballooned bodies and egg heads who are used to promote various value added services of Vodafone. These ads though look animated are actually real humans in the Zoozoo costumes. The ads were created by Ogilvy & Mather, an agency that handles Vodafone advertisements and the films were shot by Bangalore based Nirvana Films in Cape Town, South Africa.

Here is an analysis of the various social media tools used in the campaign –

- YouTube: In just one month the channel became 24th most Subscribed Channel (All Time- India) with 1,741 subscribers. The number is pretty low but given the low penetration of high speed internet in India this is appreciable. The channel has 129 in-links coming from various blogs. Most viewed ad and also the public favourite in conversations was Vodafone Busy Message generating a total of 197,837 views. We must consider that multiple copies of this video are available on YouTube and other video sharing sites so the real no. of views is pretty high.

Tamara Palamakumbura at DigiActive has a great interview with Dr. Awab Alvi, one of the organizers of Pakistan’s 2009 Long March on the use od social media tools to organize and report on the protest –

The campaign mixed old and familiar tools such as Twitter and Facebook, with new and customized tools. Twitter was augmented by See ‘n’ Report. Like Twitter, See ‘n’ Report collated emails but also SMS and MMS updates whilst providing a campaigners front page, compromising a geographical view, multimedia feeds, SMS feeds, twitter feeds and beautifully compiled video footage using Flowplayer (a video player for the web).

All of which was collated through CoveritLive to provide live coverage of the event. CoveritLive is a viewer that can be embedded on a blog or website to link a combination of Twitter accounts and hashtags (upto 12 twitter accounts and 6 hashtags), reader comments, multimedia and live blogs (through iPhones, Blackberries etc).

Activity was monitored through Cligs which provides analytical tools on traffic going through a site.

As Tamara says, the breadth and depth of the use of social media in the Long March is truly impressive. Rezwan at Global Voices also has a great post on the Long March.

Byron Acohido in USA Today delves into the dark world of social networking viruses and for-hire human captcha solvers —

Koobface — a cockeyed spelling of Facebook — targeted MySpace and Facebook. It initiated messages that duped victims into clicking on a Web link to view a funny YouTube video.

Clicking on the link led to instructions to download a Flash Player update required to view the video. Clicking on the video player update downloaded a copy of the worm, which instantly searched out the victim’s friend lists on Facebook and MySpace and sent copies of itself to everyone on the list. So, subsequent victims received a message that actually arrived from the account of a trusted friend.

Authoritarian governments paying astroturfers to spread propaganda in social media conversations, hacktivists using social media to recruit computers into botnets, and now viruses using for-hire captcha breakers to infiltrate social networking side — we are just beginning to see the dark side of social media.

NYT reports on the paradox of high growth with low profit potential that web 2.0 companies have to deal with in international markets –

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

Perhaps, a lighter version of the service in bandwith-starved Asia and Africa is not such a bad thing. Perhaps, Asia and Africa should build their own web 2.0 companies that are designed for low bandwidth.