Could Iran Shut Down Twitter?
June 15th, 2009 | by jz | Published in Future of the Internet, Generativity | 32 Comments
That’s the question Andrew Sullivan asks as part of his blog’s extraordinary coverage of the events now taking place in Iran. The NYT has a story out with a roundup of the use of social media during the crisis, while Publius at Obsidian Wings worries that Twitter can be blocked just like any other service.
Our OpenNet overview of the Internet in Iran dates from 2005, but it’s still largely true. (An update is in the works.) Iran has been able to impose a finely grained Internet filtering regime, not having to deal with the sheer volume of traffic that, say, China has. It’s able to treat its Internet-using public the way a school can filter what its kids see on their PCs. All Internet traffic is routed through a server farm that applies the filtering. (The government used to run U.S. company Secure Computing’s (since acquired by McAfee) SmartFilter software. Secure Computing denied selling the software to Iran; see Wikipedia’s summary. Today Iran runs its own home-grown filtering software.)
So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block access to Twitter as it could to any particular Web site, and it could even block access to some Twitter users’ feeds there while leaving others open, by simply configuring its filters to allow some Twitter urls through while filtering others. But Twitter isn’t just any particular Web site. It’s an atom designed to be built into other molecules. More than most, Twitter allows multiple paths in and out for data. Its open APIs make it trivially easy for any other Web service provider to insert a stream of tweets in or to capture what comes out. Thus Twitterfall can provide a waterfall of tweets — all viewable by going there instead of to Twitter. Anyone using at Twitterfall can tweet from there as well. You can hook up your Facebook status in either direction, so that when you tweet it automatically updates your Facebook status — or the other way around.
The very fact that Twitter itself is half-baked, coupled with its designers’ willingness to let anyone build on top of it to finish baking it (I suppose it helps not to have any apparent business model that relies on drawing people to the actual Twitter Web site), is what makes it so powerful. There’s no easy signature for a tweet-in-progress if its shorn of a direct connection to the servers at twitter.com. And with so many ways to get those tweets there and back without the user needing twitter.com, it’s far more naturally censorship resistant than most other Web sites.
Less really is more.
Publius points out that Iran could simply cut off all Internet access, or at least all access for most people there. Maybe it’ll come to that.
June 15th, 2009 at 11:35 pm (#)
Yes, Professor JZ. Less really is more.
They, the Iranian government, might be able shut down the entire Internet for most of their people but they are really going to have trouble stopping all flash drives, iPods, cell phones, gaming devices, and cameras from moving through their borders…both ways. The information will flow. And twitter itself is so very difficult to stop. It is a generative event of the 4th kind. . It is generative.
Mark Shea
June 15th, 2009 at 11:43 pm (#)
Great elucidation of the answer to the question- why in the world since Ahmendjani can crudely try to control everything else, can’t he just shut down Twitter – it must be driving him out of his mind- or maybe he hasn’t really figured out the “half-baked advantage” of twitter.
June 15th, 2009 at 11:55 pm (#)
The main problem with the Revolution By Twitter hypothesis is that, for one purported reason or another, a lot of noise started blotting out most of the signal. Brilliant ideas to change Twitter hashtags and change all user locations/time zones to Tehran changed the ability to search for firsthand tweets by locals, something that had helped immensely in chasing down actual information. The confusion ended up getting broadcast on Air American and who knows how many other media outlets.
I’m all for pursuing (and witnessing) a people’s response to a tyrannical government by way of the internet; but when you’re an outsider watching things unfold and start to blindly repeat every tactically and technically-disadvantageous suggestion some anonymous internet user might be twittering over, you stand to make some big mistakes. Before you go retweeting this or that from some unknown source, remember that a simple innocent mistake could be costly to someone thousands of miles away.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:15 am (#)
[...] to Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School professor and expert on internet censorship, this is a function of the rather unique way that Twitter has been built. Unlike Facebook, or other systems, Twitter’s “half-baked” approach is what makes [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 2:30 am (#)
Short of shutting off the terrestial Internet completely, there is not much the government could do to avoid Twitter being used. Anyone could post to a laconi.ca server (or any chat server for that matter) under any domain, with their updates automatically fed into Twitter.
Many people or groups in Iran use (cheap) DVB technology which uses +- 2 ft satellite dishes to connect to geostationary satellites, brought into the country “semi-legal”. These connections, a few mbps downlink and +- 64-256 kbps uplink, completely bypasses the government firewall. People have found ways to distribute that connectivity within their neighbourhood/circle of friends using wireless.
So in short: time has passed where the government can shut off internet communications in Iran. Even though they still can make it seriously difficult.
Peter
June 16th, 2009 at 4:13 am (#)
[...] to Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School professor and expert on internet censorship, this is a function of the rather unique way that Twitter has been built. Unlike Facebook, or other systems, Twitter’s “half-baked” approach is what makes [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 7:58 am (#)
Hey Nicole, seems like we’re thinking the same thing :)
I wrote a story about that, from a different angle: @raminedarabiha Iran Vs social media, Guerilla tactics 2.0 – http://bit.ly/6IUUf #IranElection
June 16th, 2009 at 8:00 am (#)
Hmm. I thought this was Nicole Simon’s blog, my bad, Hootsuite’s top bar got me confused :)
June 16th, 2009 at 10:19 am (#)
[...] organizers asking anyone who can to set up proxies to keep the flow of information free and clear, rumors, pictures, videos and foreigners (in this case us, among others) trying to help but not knowing [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 12:59 pm (#)
there are also other methods, we can even tweet by ssh’ing to a remote site and using curl.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:10 pm (#)
Jonathan, we all saw this argument happen years ago with USENET – it was exactly the same idea, the decentralized system that couldn’t be effectively censored. However, it didn’t work out the way evangelists predicted. In fact, it’s pretty easy to disrupt and poison such systems, and people are noting. Not by shutting them down, but by using them to track the dissidents, and flooding the channels with misinformation and noise.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:24 pm (#)
Nice explanation!
Less really is more in this case.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:33 pm (#)
[...] Iran und Twitter – The Revolution Will Still Be Twittered und Could Iran Shut Down Twitter? [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 3:17 pm (#)
[...] to the structure of Twitter, the service is particularly hard to block. While the government could easily stop Iranian access to twitter.com, there are dozens of ways to [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 3:29 pm (#)
Even if they would shut down all internet access access via mobile phones or the like still would be possible. Only if all possible communication lines were completely blocked it would be possible to deny any tweets to come through!
June 16th, 2009 at 4:10 pm (#)
Peter,
There are unfortunately reports from Iran of gov’t thugs confiscating satellite devices. Also, they are attempting to jam satellite communications.
Lars
June 16th, 2009 at 4:16 pm (#)
[...] Intermezzo (61) 2009 Juni 16 by nambulous Could Iran Shut Down Twitter? [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 7:15 pm (#)
[...] of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 7:48 pm (#)
[...] information out.(Some of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 8:15 pm (#)
[...] of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in [...]
June 17th, 2009 at 5:19 am (#)
[...] out that as content is divorced from delivery through such open systems, blocking, for example, Twitter-as-a-network-system much harder than simply blocking Twitter the site, since there are dozens of tools and sites that [...]
June 17th, 2009 at 7:49 am (#)
[...] masiva a través de Internet a los que resulta relativamente fácil acceder -gracias sobre todo a su facilidad de uso para terceros-. Además, la compañía del pajarito es una de las pocas solidarias con los disidentes del país [...]
June 17th, 2009 at 11:08 pm (#)
[...] media, Twitter, TWT, YouTube. Leave a Comment Currently watching various media personalities pick Jonathan Zittrain’s brain regarding Twitter in Iran. While Twitter has definitely had a powerful impact here, I’m [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 3:15 am (#)
[...] proposito del fatto che le storie sono molecole e le informazioni sono atomi, Zittrain ha scritto ieri che Twitter “è un atomo disegnato per essere ricostruito all’interno [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 12:57 pm (#)
[...] so people can report filtering as it happens. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter and its cousins — how much social media is making a difference in what’s [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 7:20 pm (#)
[...] Web sites that aren’t blocked and hoping that they can connect to those that are — the way that Twitterfall can be used to tweet even if twitter.com is blocked, or visiting an anonymizer [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 12:58 pm (#)
[...] Warum Iran Twitter nicht einfach blocken kann. [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 2:50 pm (#)
[...] Could Iran Shut Down Twitter?, di Jonathan Zittrain [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 10:09 pm (#)
[...] mean it’s (necessarily) revolutionary, just that it’s a building block. Its open APIs allow it to be baked into all sorts of other services, and like other foundational technologies — [...]
July 7th, 2009 at 2:01 am (#)
[...] interactive social media are also means of coordination. A tool like Twitter with its open APIs and ‘half-baked’ development allows users to gather in different virtual networks and share APIs, content and scripts. Accessible [...]
July 24th, 2009 at 12:16 am (#)
[...] Could Iran Shut Down Twitter? Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, 15 June 2009 http://futureoftheinternet.org/could-iran-shut-down-twitter Extract: “The very fact that Twitter itself is half-baked, coupled with its designers’ willingness to let anyone build on top of it to finish baking it (I suppose it helps not to have any apparent business model that relies on drawing people to the actual Twitter Web site), is what makes it so powerful. There’s no easy signature for a tweet-in-progress if its shorn of a direct connection to the servers at twitter.com. And with so many ways to get those tweets there and back without the user needing twitter.com, it’s far more naturally censorship resistant than most other Web sites.” [...]
December 18th, 2009 at 2:17 am (#)
[...] sites like Twitter or Facebook? This is an interesting question raised in a website called “The Future of the Internet.” Here’s part of the article: “So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block [...]