Find Mediators Near You:

Revolution: Traditional Conflicts and Digital Conversations

After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, students at the University of Michigan used fax machines to distribute western news reports to institutions inside China including universities, hospitals and government offices.1 More than two decades later, information has the same power to subvert repressive regimes and technology the same power to evade censorship, but users are now connected via the internet with minimal infrastructure and no institutional oversight. With the launch of WordPress and MySpace in 2003, Facebook and Flickr in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006, the first decade of the twenty-first century ushered in an era of social media and online social networking. These sites, coupled with the widespread availability of consumer electronics with Internet capabilities (such as mobile phones) and free, open wireless connections has resulted in the creation of social networks that transcend geographic boundaries and allow users from all over the globe to share everything from comments and opinions to videos and images.

As these networks connect more and more people, what impact, if any, do they have during geopolitical conflict? In June 2009, Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister of Britain, made the provocative remark that, “you cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.” In the Prime Minister’s estimation, as a result of this phenomenon, “Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.”2 One view of social networks, epitomized by Brown, is that the free transfer of information serves as a global watchdog that can orient the attention of policymakers where it is most needed, rather than where it is most convenient. The social network is a unifying, democratizing organization that has the potential to push for positive change. Another perspective views social networks as merely bombarding an already desensitized and overwhelmed audience with specious, unverifiable information. The reality lies somewhere in the middle; as the coverage of Iran’s disputed election in 2009 illustrated, social media is a tool that during a conflict is used mostly by outsiders rather than insiders, but still influences the course of events and connects a global audience to the conflict in a more personal way.

On 12 June 2009, incumbent traditionalist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the victor in Iran’s presidential election. The announcement sparked widespread condemnation and protest by opposition candidates and their supporters who accused the government of electoral fraud. The ensuing demonstrations turned violent as government militias set up roadblocks, arrested and detained demonstrators, and dispersed protests with water cannons and tear gas.3 At the same time, Iranian authorities forbade foreign journalists from covering the protests and rallies, claiming that international coverage was unfairly biased against the regime.4 Many journalists were either expelled or placed under house arrest.5

As a result of the dearth of information available via official channels, the primary source of content during the coverage of the conflict was video, photos and reports posted online supposedly by Iranians via social media. Twitter, a microblogging service that allows users to broadcast messages of 140 characters or less, played the most infamous role. Because of its “open-ended design” and capability to broadcast via both Internet and SMS (text message), Twitter is particularly difficult for censors to block completely.6 During the second half of June 2009, a search for “Iran election” on Twitter revealed dozens of new posts and re-posts every second.7 According to social media blog Mashable, anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 tweets featuring the word “Iran” were broadcast every hour. The highest volume of “Iran” tweets occurred on June 16 with 221,744 tweets recorded in one hour.8 In fact, Twitter had originally scheduled maintenance for June 16 that would have caused a service disruption. The volume of information being received via Twitter was so prodigious that the United States’ State Department contacted Twitter and asked them to reschedule in order to avoid downtime. Twitter acquiesced and shifted their planned upgrade so the downtime occurred at 2PM PT which corresponded to the middle of the night in Iran.910 In addition, major news programs like CNN, Fox and MSNBC began reporting material and showing media retrieved via Twitter and other sites like YouTube, Flickr and Facebook.

The Iranian situation, now sometimes labelled a “Twitter Revolution,” illustrates the role of social media in disseminating information in the midst of a crisis and gives insight into what social media did and did not contribute to the Iranian situation. A year and a half after the demonstrations, many experts have pointed out that social mediaplayed an extremely limited role in actually organizing protests inside Iran. For example, Ethan Zuckerman, senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, believes that, “it’s more conventional things like word-of-mouth and phone calls that really bring massive numbers of people into the streets.”11 Some, like Foreign Policy blogger Evgeny Morozov, suggest that organizational messages via social media carry a substantial risk of being observed by vigilant authorities.12

Research done by Zuckerman on the other “Twitter Revolution” of 2009 in Moldova supports these assertions. While it received much less attention in North American media and occurred on a smaller scale, the Moldovan case is strikingly similar to that of Iran: in April, thousands in Moldova protested the re-election of the incumbent Communist Party, and Twitter was widely credited for publicizing and even facilitating the unrest. However, according to Zuckerman’s analysis, “of the 700 people who were twittering on the Moldovan protests, less than 200 were in Moldova at the time.”13 In both examples from 2009, there is considerable evidence that social media was not used to mobilize or organize popular resistance in the country embroiled in conflict.

Please click here to read the remainder of the article.

Attachments to this Article

                        author

Inessa Colaiacovo

Innessa Colaiacovo is a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island where she is a double major in Economics and French Studies. MORE >

Featured Members

ad
View all

Read these next

Category

Moral Exclusion at the Workplace: When Differences in Values Lead to Abusive Supervision

International Center for Cooperation and Conflict ResolutionWhenever there is an international or inter-ethnic conflict, whether it’s in the form of a war, invasion, exploitation, or terrorism, we often hear about...

By Regina Kim
Category

Conflict Analysis Of A Newspaper Op-Ed

So much of our ineffectiveness in ‘conflict talk’ is reflected in the editorial pages, that it’s fascinating to do the analysis. Typically, there are two ‘opposing’ arguments on a single...

By Deborah Sword
Category

Decision Making and Taking Decision in Mediation

“Certainty is a cruel mindset. It hardens our mindset against possibility.” ~ Ellen J. Langer Decision making is a process. Taking a decision is an act. In mediation, parties’ right...

By Sarathi Susheela
×