It's just that laypersons are now seeing the global news feed. You've always had a mountain of eyewitness accounts of breaking news events with varying degrees of accuracy; but now you can see every single one of them posted on twitter.
It's a journalists job to explore, verify, and report. I don't think it's bad to have access to all the chatter, but sometimes information needs context from an editor for an accurate picture to emerge. If you are not supplementing all of this information with some intelligent analysis then it's easy to get caught up in "trending topics".
I'm not confident in the ability of the common internet user to distinguish interesting but unverified chatter from quality reporting. Despite the saying "don't believe everything you read", I think a lot of people do.
We don't have perfect choices. Imperfect journalism with limited access or access to the chatter. There is bad journalism too. People tend to be less on guard themselves when presented with bad or biased journalism. At least with twitter, people are less inclined to take everything at face value.
Anyway, I am confident. Earlier on people were making ridiculous arguments about how the internet is an untrustworthy source of information. All sorts of things that were highly speculative or untrue where being put online. Douglas Adams compare this to saying you can't believe everything you here on the telephone. I think this applies here too.
Twitter is new. People don't know how to treat it properly yet. The information you hear on a bus can be unreliable. It shouldn't be treated as a perfect sample. It may contain the opinions of crazy people, biased people & bus drivers. But it's still information. People are good at sifting through this kind of information.
Indeed. I'm reminded of Fisk's reports from Baghdad during Gulf War II, which in retrospect turned out to have been mostly made up (e.g. he reported fighting at Baghdad Airport that simply didn't happen, as embedded journalists who were actually on the scene pointed out).
But as he was saying what his fans wanted to hear (i.e. that lots of US soldiers were getting killed) his career blossomed nonetheless.
I'm dubious of whether this is a real advantage. While the opportunity to expose more analysis to the raw data is real, it's much more likely that some people will take some unverified quotes out of context and amplify them for their own political purpose, and these falsities will become "facts".
People will most greatly believe things they can verify themselves. Twitter + Google change the game. The sky is blue, things fall down, and a whole onslaught of cross-corroborating first-hand reports readily accessible over the web that claim a politician is dead or a company is polluting, even if those reports are intentional disinformation by their enemies.
I completely agree with your point. Normally, it would be up to the reporters to verify this info. With Twitter and such we can go right to the sources which means we have more of a responsibility to verify what we read on our own instead of taking it as fact.
Although we have none of the tools those reporters do. We're not on the scene. We're not asking questions of those immediate sources (we don't even know if they are truly eye-witnesses...)
Proper journalism is a complex thing requiring a lot more time, effort, and money than I have for every news story. Looking at the hysteria generated by the 'reporting' on various Social Media networks in Iran.... I'm confident that very few people have those things as well.
There is value in journalism, and we are seeing exactly what that is now. Forming truly informed opinions based on social media is nearly impossible. You're better off reading the national enquirer really.
Sadly, Twitter is the best we can get right now. Does this mean we should ignore it? Absolutely not. Should we trust it without question? No way. We as a culture need to get used to "pseudo-news" chatter that we get from twitter. It's not verified reporting, but that doesn't mean it's worthless.
The problem is people don't put the information they're given up to scrutiny anymore. So much is being force fed to them that they've started to just take it sight unseen. Let me take the three examples the author gives…
* 3 million people protested in Tehran: I was just pointing this out to someone. If you truly had 3 million people and they stood in the road you'd have 5 people across. Take those 5 rows and have everyone line up behind them. In that case 3 million people would go on for roughly 114 miles (assuming about a ft of depth per person). It would be visible from space.
More important, a few thousand Iranian police wouldn't stand a chance against a group 3 million strong. They could overthrow the capital with that many people.
* Mousavi under house arrest: Possible but pretty stupid. This is the most plausible of the ones listed but it would be suicide for the ruling party to do so it stands to logic they wouldn't.
* the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid on Saturday: If you've watched the news for any amount of time you know the election committee can't invalidate an election the Ayatollah has approved of.
So under basic scrutiny all these claims seem unlikely. If people are believing them on face value they clearly aren't putting much thought into what they believe and that's the problem.
Not that I don't agree with your assertion of scrutiny, but...
1) If you watched any of the videos shot by foreigners and Iranians alike, you'd notice that there were at least 50 across if not more. This makes your calculation wrong by an order of magnitude. The videos are there to prove it.
2) Mousavi being under house arrest and then let out due to pressure caused by so many people marching and protesting is a more likely scenario. Don't underestimate the stupidity of snap decisions made when the reaction was unexpected.
3) The president of the election committee can dissent with the Ayatollah, even if it were dangerous for him personally to do so. Also, Ayatollah went back on his proclamation a day later and asked for an inquiry into the elections. This makes that the president's claim that much more valid.
None of these claims are unlikely, but caution must be exercised anyway. I'd rather believe the people in the streets than what someone from the media can tell me. If you don't believe me, watch the Twitter streams. There's a lot of misinformation there, but also a lot of good information. Sifting through this is a journalist's job.
I'll shoot it right back at you because I don't necessarily agree with you either (all your points could be valid) but at that point, for me, it comes down to Twitter.
All the points listed are "state changes". Protestors went from a group of 10s of thousands to allegedly 3 million, Mousavi went from being a free man to being under house arrest and the elections president went from supporting the election to allegedly calling it into question.
Now, if I hear news of a "state change" such as there my first question is "what's the source. If it's an anonymous guy on Twitter I don't jump to believe it. If it's the BBC I probably think it's possibly true.
So it still comes down to cognitive process or the lack there of represented by people who believed this stuff.
Oh, and btw, since it's a pet peeve of mine. Even if some areas are 50 across I have to believe the crowd would have spilt into narrower areas (since no venue is designed to hold 3 million people). But even at a constant 50 across you're still talking about almost 12 miles worth of people.
From the images, the space the protesters were gathered appear to be of the same scale as Times Square. I was there for New Years 1999. So were 2 million other people. The crowd stretched from 43rd Street (where the ball is) to just north of 59th Street (at the south end of Central Park). They lined two avenues (Broadway and 7th Ave). In NYC, it's 20 streets/mile, so that was 0.8 miles along two avenues...
I agree that state changes being reported by one person are not necessarily true. However, a state change being reported similarly by multiple unconnected sources is helluva more believable. Also, remember that BBC/CNN/etc. did not jump on this story. As a matter of fact, they've ignored it for the whole weekend, even when their international stations were reporting it on other TV channels. Who knows what their motivation for that is, besides verification (which might not have been possible, considering that communication sources were progressively jammed by security forces).
As for the number of people goes, if you take a look at the videos, you'll get a clearer picture as to how many people there are. From what I saw, it was 50+ across and it was pretty consistent width as far as the camera could see. I'm not saying that 3 million is accurate, I was just saying that videos show a lot more than 5 across and that's where you were off. ;)
Well, the issue is that now with twitter there's no such thing as "multiple unconnected sources". You don't know who is independently corroborating something, and who is parroting.
1) You appear to be unfamiliar with the game "sardines", or Times Square. People don't take up much space, especially when standing up. There are 27,878,400 Square Feet in a square mile. Each square foot can hold a person, standing up.
That means in a square mile, you can fit up to 27 million people. (not pleasantly or comfortably, but it can be done.)
2) Police have guns and fire hoses. Any of these alone is enough to control a crowd several times the size of the police force, especially the fire hoses.
3) Amanjeed (mispelled i know) is not known for employing logic. Indeed, the primary reason given by many of Mousavi's supporters was that Amanijeed was too capricious and arbitrary in his decision-making. And when you control all of the important offices and agencies (i.e., the state police and military), politics is just for show.
4) This is incorrect; the Ayatollah did not approve of the election; that is why they have launched an investigation into irregularities.
You clearly didn't put much thought into your own claims.
As to the house arrest rumor, when I saw it go by on twitter it was usually marked as unsubstantiated, and it was quickly replaced by reports he was not under house arrest.
If you are going to focus on a twitter feed, you need to be a more critical reader, but it seems to be quickly self correcting.
This is why it's vitally important that photos and videos are getting out. Anyone can tweet that the Basij are shooting people, but photos of bloody corpses in the streets are evidence enough.
Also, some accounts are more reliable than others to follow.
In the future world depicted in Ghost in the Shell technology has advanced to the point where creating 'perfect' fake video footage has become trivial. As a result, anonymous videos of important incidents are mostly useless unless a trusted news organisation or government can back up the reports.
Indeed: Ahmadinejad's supporters have released photoshopped images showing that the rallies supporting the regime are bigger than they are in reality. Trick photography was used for a similar affect by the US in Baghdad.
However, it will remain difficult to have multiple corroborating photographs of the same event that all match up. Making the truth match up is easy, but making forged videos and photos consistent when lots of separate people are releasing them is hard because it's hard to keep lies of any kind consistent without the liars being in cahoots.
Which means that reports from random people are probably more reliable than journalists or governments. Governments and news organizations can collaborate on a lie better than mobs.
It doesn't even have to be 2029AD. Technology is getting really good at this even now. Think about all the believable special effects you see in movies; imagine what a competent and well-funded team in the service of some govt agency could come up with. It doesn't have to be realtime.
Even amateurs can create believable-enough photoshop images these days, video is surely not far off. I would surmise that certain people are well aware the tech is there, or almost there. We may just need a crisis before they're able to use it.
What leads us astray is a failure to invest (intellectually) in the news as much as previous generations did. Some of this isn't a sign of intelligence, it's just a question of how people spend their time.
Are people willing to read a full page analysis, and are they willing to wait while someone dredges up the tidbits to make that page? Or, are they at least willing to do their own research? Not really, and I think that's the real point of the article. It's not that sources are necessarily bad, but that it takes time to know which are good. Ironically, the impatience that gave us instant access to information has now created so much information that it takes more time to process it all.
Twitter is just the latest example of being able to instantly talk to the world, and it feeds on everyone's impatience. News organizations know this too, that's why we have a culture of "breaking news" where all that's needed for relevance is to be the channel that brought you the story: even if there is no story yet, and you're seeing 4 hours of pontificating over a recycled video clip.
You are right, but Twitter (and, really, anything on the Internet) has the new feature of being persistent. Rumors in a crowd die out when more information comes to light. The unfailing memory of the Internet, combined with anonymity and its massive reach, creates an echo chamber that can reinforce false information long after the truth has been revealed.
We really don't need Twitter to spread false information and have a non-trivial fraction of the population believe it wholesale: What about Obama's birth certificate? I heard he was a muslim. You know he hates the United States...etc. I think that the reaction of the author here is more of a reaction to new technology than an observation of a new phenomenon. The classic game of "telephone" is as old as humanity itself.
I wonder, were there any forecasts for the Iranian election (you know, asking a couple of people and interpolating)? It would be difficult to fake those? Could give a likelihood for the election results to be false or not.
Also, aren't there any satellites pointed at Iran? Couldn't they be used to estimate the number of demonstrators?
That Washington Post survey you mention is flawed for a number of reasons, the main being that while it showed Ahmadinejad ahead 2:1, it was only with 33.8% saying they'd vote for Ahmadinejad, 13.6% for Mousavi, and a full 42.5% of the respondents saying that they were either undecided or would not answer the question.
Obviously a survey in which the amount of undecideds is far greater than the amount saying they will vote for a candidate is hardly evidence of strong polling for that candidate.
Let's suppose, however, that 100% of the undecided went for Mousavi. Well, he would have just barely won, about 55-56%. It is statistically improbable that 100% went for Mousavi. So while we are not talking about something that was mathematically impossible, we are talking about something that was statistically improbable.
Thinking about it, making a forecast in an unfree society might be quite difficult. People might be reluctant to tell random strangers who they would vote for - could be spies from the government.
Another good point to note is that the winner of this election has little to no power at all within the Iranian state. In fact, I think he has close to zero say in any policy making. The Ayatullah runs the show people (completely). Does it really matter who won?
Perhaps social media tools are amplifying dissenting voices in Iran, but I'd argue it's more of a consequence of the Iranian government's policies than anything else. Skepticism of the electoral process wouldn't have arisen in the first place if it were open and there existed institutions (i.e. free press) to protect against exploitation. If there was more independently verifiable information provided by the Iranian government, rumors and exaggerations wouldn't explode through these communication mediums. Data wants to be free. Let it :)
Twitter can be a great source of information , but only if you can independently verify what's being said. The problem is, there's no way for us to do that in Iran, except to rely on the more traditional media and journalists. That's what always gets me when I read Twitter boosters go on about how Twitter is better than the news because it's "real time." How much of an advantage is being "real-time" if you aren't also reliable?
Do you have any evidence to back up this hunch, or is this just the usual sort of unreasoned paranoia that sees third-party involvement behind any action against a disliked government?
The protests are real; the photos and video that have emerged so far are proof of that. And they have unfolded in a manner that's entirely plausible and did not require the involvement of non-Iranian third parties to get to the point they're at now. Until any plausible evidence emerges that significant numbers of tweets were forgeries, I think the more reasonable position to take is to assume they're real and Iranian. Of course, this does not mean they should be automatically believed, as like all low-level eyewitness accounts they are necessarily subject to inaccurate rumours, flawed conclusions, personal biases and all the rest, but the mere fact that many of these tweets are inaccurate does not imply that they weren't posted in Iran and it does not diminish their value in letting the rest of us know what it's like for ordinary people at street level in Iran's cities.
How do we even know they are accurate? Twitter seems like a great propaganda tool.
Sorry after 8 years of Bush administration meddling in Iran (and decades of US meddling prior) why should we believe any of it. The people who died are just sad pawns in someone else's struggle.
It's a journalists job to explore, verify, and report. I don't think it's bad to have access to all the chatter, but sometimes information needs context from an editor for an accurate picture to emerge. If you are not supplementing all of this information with some intelligent analysis then it's easy to get caught up in "trending topics".