JohnCalvinYoung.com

Four can­di­dates stood for elec­tion for President over the week­end in Iran, and to nobody’s sur­prise the incum­bent Ahmadinejad (also known as Ahmadi) won, even though uncon­firmed reports were that Mousavi, one of the reformist can­di­dates, won by a sig­nif­i­cant percentage–and was sup­pos­edly con­tacted by the Ministry of Elections to con­firm it before Ahmadinejad’s win was announced. Over the past two days, stu­dents have been besieged in their dorms by a home­grown Iranian hard­line Islamic group, Ansar-Hezbollah. Students and oth­ers have been beated and killed. At 4PM Monday in Tehran, hun­dreds of thou­sands of cit­i­zens took to the streets in a peace­ful demon­stra­tion call­ing for a new elec­tion, despite riot police using tear gas, elec­tric batons, and other meth­ods to sub­due and threaten them, includ­ing beat­ings of peo­ple using cell phones in the streets. Some for­eign jour­nal­ists are being asked to leave Iran, as the elec­tions are over. Web sites for oppo­si­tion can­di­dates are down or hacked, and Internet access in Iran is being blocked, but some are able to get con­nec­tions out, although they keep hav­ing to switch prox­ies as con­nec­tions are brought down.

At least this is the story as we have been able to fig­ure it out.

Today in Iran Twitter is prov­ing its value as an instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion and broad­cast medium for dis­si­dents in Tehran. Mainstream media sources have nearly ignored recent sig­nif­i­cant events in Iran, (CNN, BBC Persia, and the NY Times have report­edly cov­ered it to some degree but MSN, Fox, the Washington Post and oth­ers are said to have had only per­func­tory cov­er­age). A hand­ful of dis­si­dents and stu­dents in Tehran are man­ag­ing fill the gap, how­ever, post­ing infor­ma­tion to Twitter from the ground as events unfold. Some are keep­ing up 20–30 tweets/hour or bet­ter, and their posts are being re-tweeted around the world in real­time. A live search of the #IranElections hash­tag on Twitter returns 30 to 80 posts a minute from peo­ple on the ground in Iran and dis­cussing the events around the world.

Photos and video are com­ing from the ground as well. BBC Persia has some live footage of the march, going on its fifth hour in Tehran. One user has been post­ing links to most of the TwitPic pho­tos going up from the march itself, while ________ (a dis­si­dent on the ground) and _________ (a stu­dent at Tehran University) posted links ear­lier to two Farsi-language blogs with pho­tos of the results of the uni­ver­sity siege at http://25khordad.wordpress.com/ and http://entesabat88.persianblog.ir/. A video walk-through of a wrecked dorm at Tehran University can be found on Youtube here. Photos of police chas­ing peo­ple and a pro­tester pro­tect­ing a fallen riot cop are sur­fac­ing, as well as a photo show­ing that Mousavi is indeed in the crowd today, con­trary to some reports. A video of a chant­ing crowd stream­ing down a major avenue in Tehran will give you goose­bumps. Twitpipe and Twitcaps give you live streams of  twit­ter posts and images, respec­tively, relat­ing to the Iranian Elections. Twitter and the Internet are chang­ing the way the world works.

Some in the blo­gos­phere state­side are doing a good job trans­lat­ing and syn­di­cat­ing the stream com­ing out of Iran. Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish is live-blogging the Iranian events. He has an excel­lent run­down of the weekend’s news here, and a par­tic­u­larly haunt­ing post of pho­tos and tweets from the inside here. FiveThirtyEight has an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion of why exactly the reported elec­tion results are sta­tis­ti­cally hard to believe. And I and thou­sands of other Twitter users are retweet­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing the high­lights of the infor­ma­tion stream to our followers.

Please pray for Christians and dis­si­dents in Iran–this is a very dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion. Some have already died, and this could turn into a mas­sacre at a moment’s notice. It is a great oppor­tu­nity though, as well, for a crit­i­cal change in gov­ern­ment to occur in Iran, one of the most closed coun­tries on earth to democ­racy and the gospel. The newest reports on Twitter are say­ing that vio­lence is ramp­ing back up after twi­light, and the streets are no longer safe. The inter­net and mobile net­works are a ten­u­ous link in a closed coun­try, and we know that the gov­ern­ment is actively try­ing to shut down these infor­ma­tion leaks. Pray for free­dom for this coun­try, and for the con­tin­ued health of those try­ing to let the world know what is happening!

John Calvin Young

Late break­ing: Youtube chan­nel of videos from Tehran today at http://www.youtube.com/user/iran09twitter

UPDATE: I can no longer dis­trib­ute user­names of trusted sources on Twitter, as the gov­ern­ment is using cyber­war­fare tac­tics to track down and threaten, arrest, or do worse to those try­ing to get infor­ma­tion out of the coun­try. Don’t retweet raw infor­ma­tion from the hash­tag stream–there are known fake users post­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion for pub­lic­ity or to muddy the waters. Stay with trusted sources–watch mine and other twit­ter streams known to use trusted sources, and read any IR twit­ter­ers care­fully, check­ing back over their update his­tory for con­sis­tency and oppo­si­tion to the gov­ern­ment. The most polemic are not nec­es­sar­ily the most accu­rate. I regret that the sit­u­a­tion has reached that point, but secu­rity now demands a dif­fer­ent level of behav­ior. Some things you can do: IR twit­ter­ers are ask­ing that users out­side the coun­try switch their loca­tion and time zone to Tehran (+3:30 GMT) to swell the num­bers of “Tehran” twit­ter­ers and make the government’s search harder. Also, if you do find a trust­wor­thy source, don’t RT indis­crim­i­nately with the username–use “RT from Iran”. These users are more con­cerned about their lives than about proper credit. An excel­lent arti­cle on the cyber­war­fare going on and what you can do is posted at http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/16/cyberwar-guide-for-i.html.  To para­phrase another user dis­cussing secu­rity, remem­ber it’s not a game or an inter­net meme to Iranian twitterers…it doesn’t close when they shut down TweetDeck or sign out of their browser. Many are hun­kered down in safe houses or ruined build­ings around Tehran, hop­ing to live out the night. Read, RT, reply, dis­cuss to your heart’s con­tent, but don’t be the one that exposes these brave mem­bers of the oppo­si­tion to the government!