"Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."<p>A very simple observation, but so true, and so common-sense that you would almost overlook it.
Protests happen all the time, all over the world. Twitter, Youtube, definitely played a huge role in bringing the opinions/thoughts of the Iranians to the rest of the world. Its unfair to say Twitter did nothing to the revolution itself. It was not meant to do anything. Just tell you what people all over the world thought about it. And it did a bloody good job.. probably starting an info revolution of its own.
Between this and the fact that Ahmadinejad never said Israel should be wiped off the map[1], I'm beginning to think MSM reports about Iran can't be trusted.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#.22Wiped_off_the_map.22_or_.22Vanish_from_the_pages_of_time.22_translation" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#...</a>
Honestly, guys, I wouldn't read <i>too</i> much into all of this. If you've been around "the internet" for very long, you should have a pretty finely tuned "bullshit detector".<p>There were a lot of people who were running proxies, and TOR exit nodes, and VPN endpoints, and FTP dumps, and soforth, and those services absolutely were used to smuggle photos and videos out of the country while things were being filtered.<p>Behind all of the "make your twitter pic green, set your timezone to tehran!" etc. etc. there was really amazingly good reporting happening via the internet.<p>Did most of it happen via twitter? Probably not, but it certainly did help things spread when they <i>did</i> happen...granted, if you're just watching a hashtag that <i>anybody</i> can tag things with...then you're probably not getting much legitimate news.<p>Use your mind when reading the news, this shouldn't be anything new.
I don't think this type of analysis is simply trying to shatter Western social media fantasies. It's important to know the true effect so the technology is not misapplied in future events: "they don't need our help, they have Twitter...."