How Iran May Legitimize Twitter…

Has anyone been reading the posts from Iran on Twitter? The two people on the ground (@iran09 and @persiankiwi ) seem to be accomplishing what traditional communication channels have not been able to muster. Here is a link to the disturbing photos http://twitpic.com/photos/madyar and an excerpt from MSNBC (thanks @RushtonM).

"With traditional reporting silenced and e-mail and many Web sites shut down by the government, much of the information from Tehran was coming through social media Internet services like Twitter.com and Facebook.com, which can be accessed through mobile devices and cell phone networks.

Twitter postponed a scheduled blackout for maintenance Tuesday so as not to silence the protesters after the U.S. State Department lobbied it to keep its service running during the unrest, a State Department official said. The official said the United States wanted to highlight “Twitter’s role as an important means of communication — not with us — but horizontally in Iran.”

Messages from people claiming to be eyewitnesses to the violence were flowing into Twitter at the rate of hundreds a minute. Posts would flood in, only to slow to a trickle for a minute or two as Iranian censors sought to stanch the flow of information. Then posts would resume in a torrent as users found ways around the censorship."