I Speak To Twitter. And The World. 06:19:2009

At 7:00p.m., Guardian.co.uk posted an article written by Mohsen Makhmalbaf titled: I speak for Mousavi. And Iran. This article sparked the largest episode of Noise-to-News Ratio related confusion I have ever seen on Twitter.
Some tweeters considered the line from Makhmalbaf’s article,

“The office of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who the Iranian people truly want as their leader, has asked me to do so. They have asked me to tell how Mousavi’s headquarters was wrecked by plainclothes police officers. To tell how the commanders of the revolutionary guard ordered him to stay silent. To urge people to take to the streets because Mousavi could not do so directly.”

as a hint Mousavi (also spelled Moussavi) had been arrested.  When @ProtesterHelp tweeted this information along with a link to M. Makhmalbaf’s article, Twitter exploded.  With such a large number of tweeters paying close attention to the #IranElection topic on the site (including celebrities), a tweet like that could easily upset the already absent balance of social media and confirmed truth – and it did… predictably.

Add to that the Huffington Post’s article Iran Updates which is 6 days old (at the time of this blog) but includes direct quotes of Today’s article from the Guardian and goes so far as to say, “4:48 PM ET — “All those close to Mousavi have been arrested.” Via Jeremy, Mousavi’s international spokesman.”

But this noise wasn’t simply caused by two confirmed news sources in mainstream media – it was caused by:

• Bloggers
• Facebook and Google
• Internet-based news houses
• YouTube
• Mainstream print news houses online and,
• Even Yahoo! got in the mix of things.

I speak to Twitter and the world when I tell you we all feel this way: photo courtesty of http://tehrandaily.wordpress.com

We all feel her pain and her triumph in the face of injustice, violence, and fraud.  We understand her need to fight the system – it’s the reason we’re all doing it too.  It’s the reason we’re using hours of our lives every day to translate and open proxies, to post and repost information, to tell our families and friends, and to shed our tears when we must.  We all feel this way – the question is not “Do you feel this way too?”  It’s “Are your feelings helping this?”

Dear Twitter, I know you understand the pain of every Iranian who supports free and fair voting practices – especially now in the face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech this morning (5:00 a.m. EST).  Most Americans haven’t even thought about the regime still existing in Iran – we are simply concerned with innocent people being beaten and murdered (some report up to 15 deaths) for asking one simple question: Where is My Vote?

For us, supporters, it is not about what has happened in the past or political relationships with foreign countries – it is simply about people who are being treated unfairly.  It is about people seeing others as human too.

Dear Twitter, I know you understand.  I know you are crying in the privacy of your bedrooms and offices.  I understand it hurts you to consider their pain and suffering.  I know.  But at what cost do you communicate your pain?  When the top trend on Twitter is #IranElection and it equals pages and pages (upon pages) of Tweets with contrasting information, arguments, political viewpoints, religious based fears, assumptions, rumours, and “Follow-Me-I’m-The-Leader” rhetoric, I wonder what it is costing the Iranians who literally need twitter to open up for them.  Are they ignored?  Do we believe them anymore because of all the misinformation being given by people who are retweeting 2 day old information?

Dear Twitter, I’m asking you to step back, take a breath and realize one very important point mainstream media accepted a very long time ago: when there is too much noise, there is no news.  We have a few news houses in America – they are widely recognized and report on each other from time to time.  We have comedians who occasionally get into the fray but never attempt to be “serious” news.  They say “up to the minute” but do not pass off their uncomfirmed information as concrete.  They have realized that with enough noise, the news becomes unreliable and thus, unhelpful to anyone.

CNN may have failed miserably in the past few days, but MSM seems to be winning in this arena.
-SF