Tag Archive for 'Iran'

Irish Times Story on Iran’s Twitter (Non-)Revolution

Irish Times recently quoted me in a story on how Iran’s Twitter (Non-)Revolution was a figment of our collective imagination.

Earlier, I have written extensively about how the Western media had over-hyped Twitter’s role in Iran’s Green Revolution.

Here’s the full text of the story –

The revolution was not tweeted
The Irish Times – Saturday, February 20, 2010

The protests following last year’s Iranian election were hailed as the ‘Twitter Revolution’. But a new reports claims Twitter had little or no effect on the events that unfolded. So does social media have a role to play in social activism? asks MARY FITZGERALD Foreign Affairs Correspondent

REMEMBER ALL the headlines breathlessly declaring last summer’s post-election turmoil in Iran to be some kind of Twitter Revolution? When tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed return to power, countless western commentators rushed to declare the microblogging service the hero of the hour. Twitter was hailed as a valuable instrument for organising demonstrations, acting as a means of communication between protesters, and providing the latest information on the dramatic events unfolding in the Islamic Republic. “The revolution will be twittered,” proclaimed US-based blogger Andrew Sullivan.

“This is it. The big one,” opined new media guru Clay Shirky.

The Twitter Revolution narrative became so compelling that a US state department official reportedly asked the company to postpone maintenance work so as not to disrupt the flow of tweets apparently emanating from Iran. British prime minister Gordon Brown argued that this brave new digital world meant that something like the Rwandan genocide could not happen again.

But the notion that Twitter and other social media played a defining role in orchestrating one of the greatest challenges the Islamic Republic has faced in its 30-year history always seemed vastly overcooked to anyone who was on the ground in Iran at the time.

Of the scores of protesters I met in Tehran and two other major cities, Isfahan and Shiraz, only one had ever used Twitter, and she admitted that was only once or twice. Most had never even heard of it. With internet access disrupted and text-messaging services shut down, Iranians learned of the anti-government rallies through word of mouth or calls made on landline phones.

The Iranian Twitter Revolution meme is thoroughly debunked in Cloud Culture , a new study examining the impact of social media on the way we live our lives. It reports that a third of Iranians have internet access and the number of Twitter users in the country during last June’s unrest amounted to just 0.082 per cent of the population. “It’s clear that its influence in co-ordinating a serious challenge to a powerfully entrenched regime was wildly overstated,” the report notes.

The idea that Iran was undergoing a Twitter Revolution incorrectly characterised and even trivialised what happened last summer, says Parvin Ardalan, a leading Iranian women’s rights activist who attended the protests. “It was much deeper and wider than that. It involved people from every level of society,” she argues, adding that the focus on Twitter, Facebook and other social media helped bolster the Iranian regime’s claims that the protests were part of a western conspiracy to destabilise the country.

THE EXAMPLE OF Iran poses broader questions regarding the use of new media for social and political activism in authoritarian states. The novelty of these tools and their potential to change the way we behave and interact has given rise to what some have termed techno-utopianism. One of the sceptics when it comes to techno-utopianist ideas about the power of the web as a tool for dissidents in oppressive states is Evgeny Morozov, currently the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University. Morozov, whose book on the internet and democracy will be published later this year, argues that the more democratic a country already is, the greater role social media can play.

“I’ve come to believe that it’s not our faulty understanding of the internet, but our faulty understanding of modern authoritarianism and the process of democratisation that confuses us,” he says in an e-mail interview.

“I bet most pundits and policy wonks in Washington, and to a smaller degree Brussels, think of Iranians or the Chinese as being on the brink of the revolution – all they need to add is just some technology . . . This is a very naive view and it underestimates the degree of popularity that these regimes actually enjoy. In short, I think we need to sort out our politics before we even start thinking about technology’s role in it.”

Morozov says his main concern relates to the growing politicisation of cyberspace, in which “the US government acts or speaks as if Google/Twitter/Facebook are the next Voice of America – which makes authoritarian governments suspect that all users of such services are potentially revolutionaries of some sort.” Sooner or later, he maintains, this will lead to “the further ‘localisation’ of the web, whereby local Chinese, Iranian, Russian companies will become more successful than American ones.”

AN UNFORTUNATE consequence of this, Morozov adds, is that native firms are much more likely to bow to government censorship pressure. “To a large extent, this is already happening in China.” The potential of the web and social media as tools for political and human-rights activism is a double-edged sword. There is much evidence of repressive governments developing increasingly sophisticated programmes to monitor, manipulate and subvert information transmitted on the internet.

“Surveillance and censorship is growing and the lack of security for digitally stored or communicated information is becoming a major problem for human-rights defenders in some countries,” says Dublin-based human rights organisation Front Line.

Working with Tactical Tech, an international NGO that trains advocates in the use of technology for social change, Front Line has developed a digital security tool kit so that activists can learn about ways to ensure confidential e-mail and instant messaging, anonymous surfing and censorship circumvention, data encryption and secure file deletion. At its biannual conference held in Dublin last week, Front Line organised workshops on digital security for some 100 human rights defenders attending the event.

“There is great enthusiasm about the potential of these tools,” says Wojtek Bogusz, a digital security consultant who works with Front Line. “Very often it is the only way to get your voice heard outside a particular country, and sometimes it is the only way of communicating internally too.

“We can see how powerful and serious this is as a means of communication from the actions governments like those in China and Iran are taking to control or suppress it.”

Ali, a man who works for Tactical Tech, says the importance of the sense of community engendered by social media should not be underestimated. “Human rights activists can often feel isolated and their work can make them feel like David against the Goliath. These tools help by allowing them discover that people on the other side of the world are doing similar things. That brings a feeling of empowerment.”

Gaurav Mishra, who has organised social media-based campaigns for elections in India, says one of the main reasons to use Twitter or Facebook in these contexts is that it increases the chances that your cause will catch the attention of an international media obsessed with such tools. “Political organisers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect – not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools,” he told BusinessWeek in the wake of the Iranian protests last year. “So you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited.”

Published on March 17, 2010 in Tags: , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

Associated Press Story on the Role of Social Media in Iran’s Green Revolution

I was quoted yesterday in an Associated Press story on the role of social media in Iran’s “Green Revolution”.

Gaurav Mishra, CEO of the social media research and strategy company 20:20 WebTech, said Twitter and Facebook do help get news out of Iran, but he warned against exaggerating their power to enact change.

“At best, these tools are catalysts, which are very important roles, but should not be overrated,” he said. “To expect Twitter and Facebook on their own to make a fundamental change in that situation is expecting too much.”

The story has also appeared in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Las Vegas Sun, Boston Globe, ABC7/ WJLA and NPR, amongst others.

I had earlier written about the irony of calling Iran’s “Green Revolution” a “Twitter Revolution” and was quoted in BusinessWeek, Forbes, BBC, MSNBC, Associated Press, and Worldfocus amongst others.

Published on July 25, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

BBC’s World Have Your Say Talk Show on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’

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 think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra from 20:20 Webtech. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

But with increased restrictions on reporting inside Iran should we not just accept that social media is our best bet of getting continuing coverage on the events right now? We at WHYS have struggled to get voices out of Iran, and any we have managed to get on air have been thanks to the internet. Here’s a more detailed interview with Gaurav on Iran and Twitter. Worth a read.

Despite concerns, we’ve relied on online citizen journalism to be our primary source of information.I had an email exchange with an Iranian yesterday who wrote “you may think you are just doing your job, but you are helping to change the lives of Iranians.” There’s no doubt that many are clinging onto the internet as a lifeline and conveniently, you can’t pull the plug on the net either. But do we even know who these citizen journalists are? One thing’s for sure – they’re young, they’re tech savvy and more likely than not – pro Mousavi and middle class. We don’t even know if they are voices from inside the country.

Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty write ”Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.”

And on the other side , the Iranian authorities jammed BBC services  (and other foreign broadcasters), stopped text messages and net access in the days after the result came out, and currently reporters there – again including ours – are working under restrictions.

So it’s not as if it’s just one side trying to “control the message”.

So is it hard to get to the truth in Iran?

Published on June 28, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

AJC Story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’

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.

After the June 12 election’s disputed result, the social media network again came into play as supporters of Mousavi and Karroubi used it to transmit images and reports about voting disputes and what they said was violent police suppression of demonstrations.

Via the Internet and cable and satellite television networks, the world has seen and heard firsthand accounts of the massive protests, even when foreign reporters were not present to document them.

Technology spreads

It wasn’t the first time Iranians had clashed with their ayatollah-led government. In 1999, students in Tehran erupted after a reformist newspaper was shut down. But a decade ago, the concept of social media was years away and Iraq’s nascent cellphone network was small and easily controlled. The revolt quickly disappeared from the airwaves, and only later could it be confirmed that dissidents had been imprisoned, tortured and even killed.

Since then, use of the Internet and wireless technology has become much more widespread among Iran’s young and affluent city dwellers —- the bulk of the reform candidates’ supporters.

“It’s being used to try to demonstrate that the official view of events from authorities is not the real view of events,” Christopher Waddell, associate director of the school of journalism and communications at Ottawa’s Carleton University, told CanWest News Service.

Exaggerated effect?

With foreign reporters unable to travel freely in Iran, major international news organizations have quoted widely from online postings, and cable news networks, including CNN, have shown clips from Web-posted videos of the demonstrations. Twitter has been especially prominent because its ability to quickly relay brief reports lends itself to the fast-moving, chaotic situation. At its peak Tuesday, Twitter reported it had 221,744 “tweets” mentioning Iran in a single hour, and the U.S. government asked the San Francisco-based company to postpone a planned shutdown for maintenance so users in Iran would not be cut off.

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.

Another concern is that there is no way to verify the source of postings —- a caution CNN repeatedly cited as it nevertheless showed videos and cited messages obtained from them. In addition, the information they provide is disorganized, providing a fragmented and often confusing account.

“The problem with this is that it’s so unfiltered, it’s like being in a blizzard sometimes, and it’s very hard to judge what’s true and what’s not,” James Topham, a Twitter user and communications director for War Child Canada, told CanWest.

But Timothy O’Brien, a blogger for new technology blog O’Reilly Radar, wrote that while he, like Mishra, thought Twitter’s impact had been exaggerated, the overall role of social media in Iran could not be overstated: “These protests are facilitated by an entire technology stack which includes Twitter, cellphones with cameras, Facebook, (text messaging), YouTube, Google … . Iranian colleagues have told me directly that Web 2.0 technologies are allowing them to communicate with other Iranians in ways that were impossible a few years ago.”

Feeling threatened

Could social media, by undermining state control of media outlets, help topple regimes such as Iran’s? The German-based International Society for Human Rights is promoting that idea, circulating an image showing Ahmadinejad cowering on a chair as a computer mouse snakes toward him. Other versions depict former Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in similar poses.

Actions by some less-than-Democratic governments would suggest they see social media as a threat. China closed access to such sites before the recent 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, and there were reports that Facebook was blocked in Moldova after an April demonstration against the election of a Communist parliament.

Iran’s government issued a stern warning Thursday, via the Iran Daily newspaper, that its Center for Cyber Crime would seek out “those inciting violence and spreading rumors in cyberspace,” who “could face grave consequences.” It lumped the Internet in with its customary enemies as it alleged that dissident Web sites were backed by Western interests.

Whether they result in regime change or a massive crackdown on dissent, the Iranian election and the protests that followed are being called the “Twitter Revolution.”Sunday Nation/World Editor Bill Steiden compiled this article.

Sunday Nation/World EditorBill Steiden compiled this article.

Published on June 28, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

Forbes Story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’

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.”

Published on June 19, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

MSNBC Story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’

I was recently quoted in an MSNBC story on Iran’s Twitter Revolution –

In fact, there’s a danger in giving too much emphasis to the role played by online media in Iran’s political crisis, said Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 Web Tech, a social media research and analytics company.

“Calling what’s happening in Iran a ‘Twitter Revolution’ is not only distracting but also dangerous,” he wrote on his blog, “because it reduces a legitimate broad-based grassroots movement to what’s quickly becoming a cliche.”

Published on June 19, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , .. View Comments

Worldfocus Story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’

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”?

Gaurav Mishra: The story which I’m reading in the media is that of the “Twitter Revolution.” And the story is that Twitter is one of the key things used to organize these protests, and the State Department is contacting Twitter to make sure it doesn’t go down, and so on and so forth. That’s the wrong story — it’s the wrong story in Iran, it was the wrong story in Moldova. There is no “Twitter Revolution.” We haven’t seen a “Twitter Revolution,” and I don’t think we’ll ever see a “Twitter Revolution.”

The revolution in Iran is not about Twitter. It’s about Iranian people protesting against perceived irregularities in the election. It’s a grassroots movement, and we’re abusing it in many ways by calling it a Twitter Revolution. It’s a big country with one of the biggest elections around the world, and clearly Mousavi supporters and Ahmadinejad supporters — all of them — have huge offline networks who are getting people to mobilize, getting support and getting people to come out and protest. We are underestimating the value of that network in a country like Iran or a country like India or China — that is a network which culturally matters. Even in the U.S., that is a network that matters. So we’re really underestimating the value of that network by saying this is a “Twitter Revolution.”

On a scale of one (1) to 10, if 10 means it is a legitimate revolution, I would say Twitter as an organizing tool is at five or six.

Twitter does play a very important role in some other areas. It has played an extremely important role in fixing the world’s attention on the crisis, both in terms of getting individuals like you and me to focus on the crisis, and also in getting the attention of the international media and making sure this crisis gets the amount of coverage it deserves to get. The #cnnfail meme on Saturday, which basically asked why the protests were not on the front page of CNN — that’s a very clear example that the activists know what they’re doing. They’re using Twitter to focus international attention on Iran, and to put this on the media’s agenda.

It’s very interesting — I see different stories happening. First is the story of the protest itself, and that’s a very big, legitimate story in itself. Then there’s the story about how Twitter and Facebook are being used to organize the protests. I think that’s a fake story. It distracts from the real issue, from the real story of these protests happening in Iran, which are the biggest protests since the 1970s. And it’s dangerous — we are telling them this is an organizing tool; that you can use this tool to organize protests. That’s not the case, because in countries like India or Iran, only single-digit percentages of people use Twitter. Clearly it’s not an organizing tool.

The mobile phone is an organizing tool and e-mail is an organizing tool, because everybody has mobile phones in these countries. And the first thing you do if you want to organize a protest is send a text message to everybody in your address book. That’s how these protests are being organized in all likelihood, not via Twitter.

Worldfocus: How have traditional blogs fared in Iran compared to micro-blogging tools like Twitter?

Gaurav Mishra: We’ve seen that in all types of crisis situations — whether it’s the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the China earthquake, or the Moldova protests, or elections in India or Iran — in all these kinds of big events, Twitter is great at giving alerts. You’re seeing a news cycle emerge where at first, stories are reported on Twitter. Then, blogs pick them up, they aggregate these stories and expand on these stories. They’re the first slightly detailed sense of what’s happening. And then the news organizations come in, and they write the 30-second piece on this, or do a deep story on it. And then we go into the context phase, where people add context to it and reference old stories — and this again happens both in the mainstream media and on blogs.

And finally it goes through that news cycle, and after that context and analysis happens, people start reacting to these stories, in mainstream media and blogs — and again, the reaction happens on Twitter. So if you go through the whole news cycle, what’s happening is that in the alert stage, and in the conversation stage, Twitter plays a very important role. But in the stage of developing the story, giving it context, giving it analysis, blogs and mainstream media still play a very important role. Twitter very clearly doesn’t have a role in developing the story, giving it context and analyzing why is it important.

Worldfocus: Why is it seemingly more difficult for the Iranian government to control Twitter compared to blogs and Facebook?

Gaurav Mishra: Here’s the interesting thing about censorship and control. Typically how governments censor Web content is to ban specific URLs or specific IP addresses. So they would ban the Facebook IP address or the Twitter IP address or the blogger.com IP address or the wordpress.com IP address.

In countries where most of the bloggers are on blogger.com, once you’ve blocked blogger.com, you’ve basically blocked all the blogs in that country. However, people like me host blogs on our own URLs and on our own servers. Therefore, unless the government has a database of all the blogs which are self-hosted, they can’t really block all blogs. You can block a blogging platform easily, but it’s very difficult to block individual blogs which are self-hosted. Facebook is fairly easy to block because most people who use Facebook actually go to Facebook and use it there.

Twitter is interesting because most people who use Twitter don’t actually go to the twitter.com Web site. Most people who use Twitter go to something like TweetDeck, which is a desktop application, or one of the thousands of desktop applications to use Twitter. Or they use it via text messages. So even though you can block the twitter.com Web site, you can’t really block Twitter usage, because people can send and receive text messages, people can get tweets and send tweets on applications and it’s very difficult to block.

On all these things, whether it’s blogs, social networking sites, news Web sites, Twitter, of course there are fairly simple ways to go around the censorship. People who are technically sophisticated find it trivial to go around censorship using circumvention tools.

Worldfocus: Some Twitter users outside Iran have begun a campaign to change their profile location to Tehran, in order to shield Iranian Twitterers from government detection. Do Twitter users in Iran need this protection? And has it impeded or confused the flow of information from on the ground?

Gaurav Mishra: I think they do need this protection, because what’s happening in Iran is that a lot of people are joining Twitter, because they’re hearing about this. I saw some stats — a large number of people, some hundred, are joining every hour. The number of Twitter users in Iran is low, less than 10,000. Which means that when Twitter users join from Iran, it’s very easy to track them. Sometimes people don’t understand the complexity of this, and they reveal their location information. Then it becomes easy to profile them. I think it comes from a good place, this movement to change your Twitter location/handle to Iran to confuse Iranian authorities who might be looking to profile people.

I do think the Iranian government has more important things to do. I’m sure they have a very sophisticated database of known dissenters, and they will first go after these people. These people who are joining Twitter — they are pretty low on the list of the Iranian government in terms of cracking down on them.

I think it’s overkill, but comes from a good place. Of course it harms the information flow. The only way you can make sense of the Iran feed right now, the #iranelection feed, is filtering by location. This misguided movement precludes the possibility of making any sense of what is happening now. It also precludes the possibility for academics to go back and make sense of it after it has happened. In the Moldova “Twitter Revolution,” a lot of people went back and saw all the tweets related to Moldova. They found that of the 700 people who were tweeting about Moldova, only 200 people were actually from Moldova. So it becomes very difficult for people to do that kind of analysis when the location information itself is misguiding. It’s harmful to do this in a way, because it breaks the validity of information and introduces more noise. But I think it comes from a good place, so I’m not criticizing the people who are trying to do this. Different people have different perspectives on what is important.

Worldfocus: We’ve seen a lot of mainstream media sources quoting Twitter users in recent days. Are traditional media outlets embracing Twitter more so than in the past?

Gaurav Mishra: News organizations can’t hope to break stories anymore, in the same way you’re used to breaking stories, because you have limited bureaus outside the U.S., and there are millions of people with mobile phones out there who become accidental reporters, who just happen to be at the right place at the right time and happen to take a photo or a video or send a text message. What news organizations can do is hire people who understand these tools, who actively identify bloggers and Twitter users. The only way news organizations can catch up is by having these curators, who highlight news and the unconfirmed reports, and then who go back and try and verify these reports and add context to them, saying “This news came from somebody on Twitter, but this is what it means, and we verified it.”

What’s happening in Iran is nothing new. We’ve seen this happen before, we’ve seen this happen in multiple locations. We should stop calling these things “Twitter Revolutions.” Again and again we call these things “Twitter Revolutions,” and Twitter is not at the center of revolution.

Not only do citizens use it, but also political parties use it. In a country like India or Iran where most people are not on the Internet, political parties — especially the challengers, the incumbents don’t use it so much. Ahmadinejad did not usually use these tools, the Republicans in the U.S. didn’t really use these tools — but Democrats used it, Mousavi used it. These are great levelers that allow you to level the playing field with people in control of traditional media. I’ve seen this work in election campaigning, I’ve seen this work in protests — it’s the same dynamics happening in different situations, used by different kinds of people. We should start looking at it realistically and stop being surprised every time this happens.

Published on June 19, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

Associated Press Story on Iran’s Twitter Revolution

I was interviewed recently by Associated Press on a story on Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ –

Gaurav Mishra, the 2008-09 Yahoo Fellow at Georgetown University, said he hasn’t seen any evidence in past events such as the Moldova elections that Twitter was the dominant way people are organizing.

“It’s sometimes difficult to differentiate the hype from the media,” he said. “Just because people are tweeting about something doesn’t mean that there’s actually coordination involved.”

The story was also reproduced in The Guardian, The Independent, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, CBS News, Forbes, Huffington Post and Boston Globe.

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

Published on June 18, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

BusinessWeek Story on Iran’s Twitter Revolution

I was interviewed today for a really well-researched story in BusinessWeek on why it’s misleading to call the post-election protests in Iran a Twitter Revolution.

“I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

Mishra, who has organized social media activism campaigns for elections in India, says the main reason to use the tools is the attention it generates in the international media. Indeed, one of Twitter’s primary contributions in the Iranian elections has been to raise awareness of the issue among tech-savvy users outside the country.

“Political organizers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect—not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools,” Mishra says. “So you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited.”

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 –

Iran’s Twitter Revolution? Maybe Not Yet

Some Iranian election protesters used Twitter to get people on the streets, but most of the organizing happened the old-fashioned way

By Joel Schectman

Media across the globe have been focusing on a “Twitter Revolution” in Iran as hundreds of thousands of street protestors purportedly mobilized their demonstrations using the microblogging service. So great has the notion of Twitter’s role in the Iranian protests become that the U.S. State Dept. reportedly asked the company to defer some maintenance. Twitter says it rescheduled maintenance work from June 15 to later the next day, or about 1:30 a.m. in Iran. “It made sense for Twitter…to keep services active during this highly visible global event,” the San Francisco company said on its blog.

However, Iran experts and social networking activists say that while Iranian election protesters have certainly used social media tools, no particular technology has been instrumental to organizers’ ability to get people on the street. Indeed, most of the organizing has occurred through far more mundane means: SMS text messages and word of mouth. Sysomos, a Toronto-based Web analytics company that researches social media, says there are only about 8,600 Twitter users whose profiles indicate they are from Iran.

“I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect,” says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. “The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size.”

And with the government blocking the Twitter site, that small group becomes even smaller. Tech-savvy netizens can use proxy addresses such as Tor or Proxy.org to bypass the government block of certain IP addresses. But for many users, circumnavigating the government’s blockage is too big a hurdle, and organizing in more conventional ways, such as over the phone or by knocking on doors, can be both quicker and easier. Moreover, Twitter does not support the Farsi language, which limits its utility, particularly in more rural areas of the country.

Raising Awareness Elsewhere

Mishra, who has organized social media activism campaigns for elections in India, says the main reason to use the tools is the attention it generates in the international media. Indeed, one of Twitter’s primary contributions in the Iranian elections has been to raise awareness of the issue among tech-savvy users outside the country.

“Political organizers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect—not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools,” Mishra says. “So you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited.”

Another reason for the hype surrounding Twitter’s role in these protests is the lack of good access for reporters in Iran and the difficulty of covering the story of the protested elections. Iran’s religious leadership declared incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner on June 12 with 63% of the vote a mere two hours after polls had closed. The opposition, which had largely supported Mir Hussein Mousavi, took to the streets of Tehran to protest; bloody crackdowns by police and militia followed. At least six people have died and many more have been injured, according to reports.

For now, these tools represent the best chance the demonstrations have of getting continued coverage. “Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The reason social media is so interesting [for the press] is that the international media doesn’t have its members on the ground.”

Twitter in Moldova?

Zuckerman analyzed protests in Moldova this past April, which were also labeled a “Twitter Revolution,” and found the vast majority of tweets, or Twitter postings, during the protests were coming from outside the country, either Moldovan expats or just people sympathetic to the movement.

“Of the 700 people who were twittering on the Moldovan protests, less than 200 were in Moldova at the time,” Zuckerman said. “Social media are helpful in exposing what’s happening to the outside world, but it’s a mistake to think that these protests [in Iran] are because of social media. It’s more conventional things like word-of-mouth and phone calls that really bring massive numbers of people into the streets.”

A study by Mike Edwards, a social network researcher at Parsons The New School for Design, examined 79,000 tweets related to the Iran protests, and found that one-third are repostings of other tweets. The general ratio of reposts to posts is 1-to-20, and even in other fast-breaking global news events, when reposting might be more common, such as the swine flu outbreak, Edwards says he has seen the number go only as high as 1 in 5. This could indicate the amount of information deployed by protestors in Iran is small compared to the amount recirculated by outsiders, although Edwards cautions there are other possible explanations.

“There is this romantic notion that the people tweeting are the ones in the streets, but that is not what is happening,” Edwards says. “The hubs are generally not people on the ground, and many are not in the country.”
Exaggerating the News?

One analyst cautioned that while Twitter or Facebook may keep the outside world’s attention trained on Iranian protests, there was also a danger such tools could exaggerate the movement’s momentum. “You can get the notion that Ahmadinejad is very unpopular and that Mousavi has this groundswell of support, but we don’t have data that shows that,” says Reva Bhalla, director of analysis for Austin (Tex.)-based Stratfor, a strategic intelligence and forecasting company. “Ahmadinejad has real support, but his supporters don’t have smartphones. There is a real risk of amplifying [one side].” Ahmadinejad is thought to have a greater base of support in rural areas, while Mousavi is popular with urbanites.

Still, regardless of how much a mover social media may be in the protests, Iran watchers agree that the tools do represent a step forward. “Governments like Iran, Syria, and Egypt are really struggling with how to continue limiting information,” Bhalla said. “No matter how hard these governments try to block communication, now there is always going to be a hole. This really is a case study in how technology can affect closed societies.”

Mousavi introduced the use of social-networking tools to his campaign last month, Iran experts say, because he didn’t have the access to state-run television and newspapers Ahmadinejad enjoys. “They needed an alternative means to campaign and get their message across,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council. But Parsi, like others, acknowledges that Facebook and Twitter were important mainly for letting people outside the country follow events, and text messages and phone calls were the primary mover of people in Iran’s protests. “The people I know mainly tell me they hear about these protests from friends or by SMS,” Parsi says.

__

Schectman is a reporter for BusinessWeek in New York

This quote was also reproduced in Information Week and Christian Science Monitor.

Published on June 18, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

Updated: The Irony of Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’

Iran Green Revolution

I had earlier written about the use of social technologies in the 2009 Iran presidential election campaign.

Now, Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s supporters are disputing the overwhelming victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the elections (Hamid Tehrani at Global Voices).

Various observers have called the protests ‘Facebook/ Twitter protests’, claiming that social media tools have been critical in organizing these protests (Clay Shirky on TED Blog, Lev Glossman in Time, Mark Ambinder at The Atlantic). The #IranElection Twitter feed has indeed been hyperactive all week (Ben Parr in Mashable).

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Delicious have also been used to organize DDOS attacks against government and pro-Ahmedinejad websites, including Ahmadinejad.ir (Noah Shachtman at Wired). It seems that some US bloggers are also promoting these DDOS attacks (Nancy Scola at TechPresident) and a DC based political firm is actually participating in them, in a misguided (and illegal) attempt at digital activism (Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy).

Some Ahmadinejad supporters are also using blogs and Twitter to explain why they believe he legitimately won (Hamid Tehrani in Global Voices).

In an attempt to quell the protests, the Iran government has blocked several social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, apart from several international news websites (Richard Sambrook at BBC, Associated Press).

On the other side, the US State Department has reportedly “asked Twitter to refrain from going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time” (Elise Labott at CNN, Nancy Scola at TechPresident).

Twitter is being used in many ways in post-election Iran: for organizing protests, for sharing first hand reports from the ground, for focusing international attention on the protests and for changing the news agenda for international news organizations.

When the dust settles down on the Iran election crisis, we will see that Twitter was more useful as a media tool and not as an organizing tool. We will see that Twitter didn’t really change much in Iran in terms of organizing the protests, but it did play an important role in engaging the international community in the protests and focusing media attention on the protests (see Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy, Daniel Terdiman at CNet and Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW on #CNNFail).

In fact, there are less than 10,000 Twitter users in Iran (Sysomos via BusinessWeek) and less than 100 of them seem to be active. Given these small numbers, it’s quite amazing that their tweets have generated such a multiplier effect via retweets etc. (The number of Twitter users in Iran might be artificially high as of today because of a misguided campaign that asked people to change their Twitter location to Tehran to make it difficult for the Iran government to target dissidents.)

However, the on-ground organizing in Iran is probably happening via mobile phones and offline networks, the same networks that were previously used to mobilize Mousavi’s supporters to go out and vote for him.

Calling the Iran protests a ‘Twitter Revolution’ is not only distracting but also dangerous because it reduces a legitimate broad-based grassroots movement to what’s quickly becoming a cliche, after Moldova.

Mary Joyce at DigiActive.org uses my 4Cs social media framework to evaluate the campaign and says: “this campaign has achieved Content Creation and Collaboration on Collective Action, but will it be able to create a Community which will sustain long term action once the Iranian election is gone from the headlines?”

Evgeny Morozov shares my skepticism about “the claims that Twitter has been instrumental in organizing the protests” and thinks that it mostly played a role “in publicizing the violence or the already planned protests and rallies.”

Nancy Scola at TechPresident agrees that, “as we saw in Moldova, the idea of a “Twitter Revolution” isn’t always borne out by the facts, at least to the extent that the uprising would have not taken place without the tool.”

Brand Stone and Noam Cohen at NYT agree with me that “labeling such seemingly spontaneous anti-government demonstrations a “Twitter Revolution” has already become something of a cliché.

Kara Swisher at AllThingsD is annoyed at the media hype for Twitter “because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.”

Ethan Zuckerman is amazed at “the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions.”

Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic reminds the intelligence community that most reports on Twitter are noise, not signal intelligence.

Tom Watson at TechPresident reminds us that there are limits to what technology can do, “especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers’ guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall.”

Update: June 23, 2009

Social media analytics company Sysomos has done some great analysis on Twitter users in Iran. According to Sysomos, the number of Twitter users in Iran increased from 8654 in mid-May to 19235 in Mid June, after #iranelection. Between June 11 and June 19, the nature of tweets from these users changed. On June 11, Iran Twitter users were writing about “mousavi”, “freedom” and “vote”. On June 19, they were writing about “mousavi”, “tehran” and “protest”. Also, the percentage of #iranelection tweets coming out of Iran changed from 51.3% on June 11 to 23.8% on June 19, as a result of the international interest in the post-election protests.

Published on June 17, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

After #IndiaVotes09, Election Campaigning Goes Digital in #IranVotes

Internet and mobile tools were widely used in the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections, by political parties, civil society organizations, media houses and even corporates, leading many observers to call it India’s first digital elections.

Now, it seems that internet is being widely used in the upcoming Iranian presidential elections. Hamid Tehrani at DigiActive has a great post on these initiatives –

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supporters started to use all the digital means at their disposal. Their virtual campaign is named Dar Emtade Meh (means “following kindness”). In this site supporters are invited to use Facebook, SMS,Twitter,YouTube and blogs to communicate the message. YouTube is used in very pivotal way by campaigners and several Ahmadinejad’s meetings and trips are there. Ahmadinejad is considered a conservative politician.

Mir Hussein Mousavi, former Prime Minister, has launched an internet based TV. His campaign claims that more than 1,000 blogs announced their support of Mousavi. He is supported by former reformist president Mohammad Khatami and he calls himself an independent candidate.

The supporters of Mehdi Karrubi’s, former parliamentary speaker, have launched a Facebook page where several election films are published. Karrubi is considered a reformist candidate.

From the US, to Israel, to India, and now to Iran: it seems that the use of digital tools is now a given in any big election around the world.

Published on May 18, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

America’s Answer to China’s 50 Cents Party: K Street Lobbyists

I was interviewed yesterday by ABC7 on the sidelines of the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Summit. I’m fascinated by how news reporters pick a one sentence sound byte from a long interview. At the same event, AFP chose to quote me on how open (Western) democracies are curtailing freedom on the internet, while ABC 7 chose to quote me on how China is using its 50 Cents Party to control the internet through astroturfing instead of censorship.

My point was that US media’s obsession with internet censorship in China is misguided because of two reasons.

First,censorship is only one of the tools used by China to control the internet. Often, propaganda, surveillance and old-fashioned intimidation are more useful in controlling the internet in totalitarian regimes.

The use of the internet for propaganda, especially, threatens to convert our internet into spinternet. A case in point is China’s 50 Cent Party, which consists of 3,50,000 volunteers who are paid 50 cents for every comment they post supporting the Chinese Communist Party. Russia is, in fact, so successful in controlling the internet through propaganda that it doesn’t need to censor the internet. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have also started using blogs for propaganda.

Even more importantly, while China is one of the most extreme cases of internet censorship, it is also one of the simplest cases. To many of us, even more disturbing is the trend of open democracies like USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, India and Brazil closing down the internet by instituting over-strong pornography and cyber-crime regulations that can be misinterpreted and misused. Specifically, in the context of propaganda, these cases are more complex than the relatively simple case of China or Iran.

We know, for instance, that the Bush government used both mainstream media and the internet for domestic and foreign propaganda during the Iraq war. In another context, we also know that public relations agencies and lobbyists in the US regularly use the internet to spin misinformation and promote their self-serving agendas. Now, the same people are beginning to work closely with the State Department and the Department of Defense to use the internet for public diplomacy. With the boundaries between public/ private, defense/ diplomacy and domestic/ foreign becoming blurred, there are serious concerns about whether public diplomacy 2.0 is merely propaganda 2.0, meant to misinform and mystify both domestic and foreign audiences.

In the US media narrative, K Street lobbyists in the US are a minor annoyance, while the 50 Cent Party in China is a threat to human rights. However, to an objective third party observer (like yours truly), the K Street lobbyists look like better paid avatars of 50 Cent Party members. Perhaps, US media’s inability to connect the two narratives isn’t very different from the self-censorship of China’s government controlled news agencies.

My point is not that America is the same as China, Russia or Iran. America is a messy vibrant democracy where a million points of view compete with each other and K Street lobbyists co-exist with the Center for Media and Democracy. Also, the first amendment is, in many ways, a gold standard for freedom of expression and dissent is almost always is seen as a virtue rather than a crime.

My point is that the bad practices we condemn in totalitarian regimes are not unique to these regimes. Censorship, astroturfing, and overt propaganda are as pervasive, and as pernicious, in open democracies as in totalitarian regimes.

China, Russia and Iran do have a terrible track record on the abuse of human rights, including freedom of expression, and they do need to be taken to task by the international community. However, it’s even important that, as we condemn these “bad countries”, we continue to be wary of “bad practices” within our own glass houses.

Published on May 7, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

Is the Debate on Internet & Human Rights Nothing More Than American Propaganda Against China?

AFP quoted me on a story on the Yahoo! Business & Human Rights Summit held at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale office on May 5 –

Western countries have been striving to “close the Internet” in the names of causes such as fighting pornography or cyber crime, said Gaurav Mishra who blogs about happenings in India.

The story was also reproduced in The Age, Brisbane Times, France 24, The Sydney Morning Herald, and CNN Money, amongst others.

Taken out of context, my comment might sound strange, or even outrageous, so it’s important that I put it in context.

The popular narrative about human rights and the internet is that there are two types of countries: open democracies like USA which have a free and open internet and closed totalitarian regimes like China which have a closed, censored internet. However, as the internet is “essentially free and borderless”, the hope is that, over time, it will make these closed societies more open, more like Western democracies.

This narrative is flawed at two levels.

First, the internet isn’t inherently free or borderless. It has already become evident that governments have both the will and the means to force the internet to conform to the rules and regulations within their national boundaries. It has also become evident that the internet itself, like any other technology, is neutral and value-agnostic. So, it can be used for free expression and activism, but it can also be used for propaganda and suveillance. China, Russia and Iran, amongst other repressive regimes, are using a combination of censorship, astrofurfing and old school intimidation to control the internet, in one form or another.

Second, the internet in the open (Western) democracies isn’t really open anymore. Open democracies like USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, India and Brazil are closing down the internet in many ways by instituting over-strong pornography and cyber-crime regulations that censor content at ISP level, limit anonymity by linking internet access to real world identity, and force internet companies to share user data. Most of these regulations are supposed to protect internet users, but in the hands of extremist or paranoid elements in these open democracies, they can be easily misinterpreted and misused.

So, my fear is that both open democracies and closed totalitarian regimes are moving towards each other and will meet in an unhappy middle that is very different from the free and open internet we know today.

The discussion around internet and human rights needs to move beyond its US-centric China-Russia-Iran fixation to include “open” democracies like USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, India and Brazil. Unless the focus of this discussion changes from “bad countries” to “bad practices”, there’s a risk that it will be seen as nothing more than US propaganda against unfriendly countries.

Published on May 6, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

Internet, Democracy, and Hypocrisy

John Markoff in NYT wonders if we need a new Internet –

There is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users.

I’m deeply disturbed that such noises are becoming increasingly louder in democratic Western countries like the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. These discussions start off as a plea for security against malware, fraudsters and sexual predators but quickly degenerate into a plan to centralize and control the internet by limiting online anonymity and end point generativity.

These discussions aren’t only misguided but also hypocritical. On one hand, the West holds up the Internet as a symbol of the open, transparent and participatory nature of their democratic political systems and insists on highlighting the censored and controlled nature of the internet in closed societies like China and Iran. On the other hand, it simultaneously seeks to close down the internet.

The West needs to realize that moves to control the internet will not only kill the innovation and creativity it fosters, but also undermine the democratic values it symbolizes. The hope that the Internet will aid democracy in China and Iran will not be realized unless the West sets the right example at home.

We usually think of democratic countries on one side and authoritarian countries on the other side and hope that the internet will move the authoritarian countries towards democracy. However, based on evidence so far, it seems that both sets of countries are moving towards the center and we’ll end up with a middle of nowhere gated internet.

Cross-posted on MSFS 556: Social Media in Business, Development and Government.

Published on February 23, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

OSI Forum: New Media in Authoritarian Societies

Here’s a great 75 minute video of some of my favorite thinkers about blogging — John Kelly, Evgeny Morozov, and Ethan Zuckerman — talking at the OSI Forum: New Media in Authoritarian Societies –

Darius Cuplinskas, head of OSI’s Information Program, frames the discussion by pointing out that all the three stories we tell ourselves about the effect of new media on society — Don Tapscott‘s utopian picture in ‘Grown Up Digital’, Andrew Keen‘s dystopian version in ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ and Cass Sunstein’s more nuanced approach in ‘Infotopia’ — are largely based on research in open societies, especially on the US. There’s very little work on the effects of new media in other parts of the world, especially in closed societies.

John Kelly talks about his map of the Iranian blogosphere (PDF) and his ongoing efforts to develop similar maps of the blogospheres in other countries, including Russia and China. The maps basically group blogs belonging to a country or a language into clusters based on the linking behavior between the blogs and the content on the blogs.

The English language blogosphere, for instance, has four main clusters: US progressive political blogs, US conservative political blogs, technology blogs and UK blogs.

The Iranian blogosphere has several distinct clusters based on political and religious leanings, apart from a big cluster of poetry blogs. The reformist political blog cluster is the most visible in the West, and is also the most censored within Iran, but the other clusters are also censored to different degrees.

It’s difficult to map the Russian and Chinese blogospheres because linking behavior in these countries is driven by the platform the blog is hosted on. For instance, the Russian blogosphere is difficult to study because most bloggers use LiveJournal and only link to other LiveJournal users.

Kelly suggests that rewards related to social capital and recognition by fellow bloggers and journalists are important for the blogosphere to function as a vibrant online public sphere.

Ethan Zuckerman talks about blogging about politics (and the politics of blogging) in Africa and says that a blogosphere needs well-connected and influential bloggers for it to perform the role of a public sphere and aid democracy. He suggests that bloggers move from bridge-blogging in English to native-blogging in the local languages, as their blogosphere matures. He also points out that the usual content on a popular blog isn’t really an indicator of its political impact because many bloggers who don’t usually blog about politics inevitably become involved in political debate during a crisis.

He also suggests that censorship can take many forms, from blocking SMS services in the entire country, to blocking individual blogs or blogging services, to the more sophisticated and selective censorship being used in China. He suggests that widespread surveillance and pervasive censorship in China may force activists to use web 1.0 tools like bulletin boards, which are less powerful, but harder to control.

Evgeny Morozov also talks about the limitations of using quantitative techniques to map the public blogosphere in repressive regimes when the real activists are more likely to remain semi-private to protect themselves. He also uses examples of cyber-hacktivism in the Russia-Georgia Ossetia war to argue that censorship can be both hard and soft and it can be carried out by both state and non-state actors.

He suggests that governments are becoming increasingly sophisticated in using new media to support government ideology, using a combination of censorship and propaganda and employing new techniques like denial of service attacks and astroturf campaigns.

It’s a great panel discussion, except that Porochista Khakpour, an Iranian-American writer who talks about how the Iranian diaspora uses the internet, looks a little out of place on the panel.

Cross-posted at Social Media in Business, Development and Government.

Published on January 15, 2009 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments

Social Network World Map: Why Do Indians & Brazilians Love Orkut?

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog – How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

Here’s the latest world map of social networks based on Alexa data (via Oxyweb) –

World Map of Social Networks 2008

– and Indian and Brazil are the only two countries in the world where Orkut is the most popular social network.

I have often wondered what joins Brazilians and Indians in their love for Orkut. The answer is a combination of serendipity, first mover advantage, faster loading time, simplicity of the name, similarity of the name to Hindi/ Portuguese sounds, simplicity of the user interface, and association with the Google brand name, but the most powerful reason is the lax attitude towards privacy common to Indians and Brazilians.

In spite of the contrary results on the Synovate survey on online privacy, both Brazilians and Indians share generally lax attitudes about online privacy.

This is reflected in the much less fine-grained privacy controls (only friends and friend-of-friends), the excessively open, almost exhibitionist profiles (especially by Brazilian women), the very voyeuristic and totally transparent browsing behavior of Brazilian and Indian men (and their tendency to ask strange women to be friends), the general tendency to add strangers as friends, the open “crush” and “favorite” features, and, finally, the open and often spammy scrapbooks.

Here’s my theory of Orkut adoption in Brazil and India –

Step 1: Orkut became popular in Brazil and India because of the first mover advantage. Google spread to the international markets earlier than either Facebook or MySpace did. It helped that all the reasons described above worked in Orkut’s favor.

Step 2: As a result of the invitation based membership system, Orkut’s membership stayed limited to Brazil, India, Iran (where it was subsequently banned) and United States. As Brazilians started dominating Orkut, it turned off the Americans (a similar dynamic also happened in the case of Fotolog). However, the strong presence of the Brazilians was not a turn off for the Indians and may have even been an additional turn on (many Indian male Orkut users spend hours browsing through the profiles of female Brazilian users). So, Brazilians and Indians continued to grow on Orkut.

Step 3: As Orkut became the default social network in Brazil and India, the network effects kicked in. As most Brazilian and Indian social networking users were on Orkut, new users made their first, and often the only, social networking profile on Orkut, in order to connect with their friends.

Step 4: Now that Orkut is managed out of Brazil, most Brazilians look at it with pride as a local social network. So, the dominance of Orkut in the Brazilian social networking space is not likely to be threatened. However, ever since Facebook opened up, it has made steady inroads into Orkut’s territory in India, through a trickle down process. First the NRIs (Non Resident Indians) started using it in their US universities, then they got their well-to-do friends in metro India to move from Orkut to Facebook and now youngsters in even smaller towns are beginning to use Facebook, along with Orkut.

For more on why Orkut is popular in Brazil see posts by Daniel Duende and Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, and the discussion in the comments section on this otherwise pointless post by Loren Baker.

Published on October 22, 2008 in Tags: , , , , , , , , , .. View Comments