Come on now...

This Twitterer has generated a few tweets on the situation in Iran and has re-tweeted several tweets himself; agrees that some good information has been available via Twitter, which has succeeded in breaking some news first and in providing greater visibility in a few instances; but he is not ready to drink the Kool-Aid being peddled by some re a 'Twitter revolution in Iran" and how this represents some sort of technological breakthrough that has empowered the people and freed them from dependence on the despised "MSM."

As the number of tweets about the recent Iranian elections grew (astronomically), the ratio of signal to noise fell correspondingly, ending at abysmally low levels... A smaller number of originally tweets were re- and re-re-tweeted, bouncing around the Twittersphere (or is it Twitterverse?) as if in an echo chamber. An example of this might be the meme that the pattern of vote declarations over time had been statistically analyzed to 'prove' electoral fraud. Even in the very small number of those followed by Tosk59, this "proof" was re-tweeted a very large number of times over a span of days. Eventually, this was debunked by Nate Silver at the Five Thirty Eight blog. This debunking subsequently also made the rounds, albeit at a slower pace a day or so later. (Note: interestingly enough the debunking was also twittered by folks who had originally read and tweeted the meme about the "proof", but given the way Twitter works and the limitations of 140 characters, the two came across as two entirely different subjects, and not that the second in fact meant that the folks who had tweeted the original meme had been in error.)

This Twitterer had originally intended to write in greater detail re problems with the current Twitter hagiography, but this has already been done by a number of observers - see the links below for some good critiques. So he will content himself with pointing out some minor foolishness in the Twitter stream:

• Several tweets made the rounds imploring folks to stop using the #iranelection hashtag and to switch to other hashtags (e.g. to #iran09), this ostensibly because tweets containing the former were being filtered and blocked by the authorities in Iran. This seemed rather foolish to this Twitterer, since if this was really happening it would be far more likely that they would be filtering/blocking all tweets containing the string 'iran', which would catch the new hashtag along with the old! Of course a round of 'it's ok to continue using #iranelection' came a little later!
• After a couple of days came a flood of tweets related to security. Folks were counseled not to pay any attention to the "fakes" who were putting forth disinformation and shilling for the Iranian government; requests poured forth that everyone should set their location to Tehran (again to fool the authorities); and lists of proxy IPs were circulated. More than anything, it resembled a theater of the absurd. How was one to determine a "fake" pray tell? Apparently their 'newness' was suspicious! Leaving aside the fact that many of the 'genuine' Twitterers had not been on long, it seemed that more than anything else, what it boiled down to was whether their tweets accorded with one's pre-existing opinion of what was going on... A new Twitterer retweeted by Tosk59 was accused by another of being a fake, just for tweeting skeptically re the claims of electoral fraud! Naturally a follow-up sets of tweets followed that countermanded the 'set your location to Tehran' and 'use these proxy IPs' memes (since apparently this might actually be helpful to the authorities!)

Bottom line: this Twitterer's position in this regard is closer to the one enunciated by The Economist i.e. "The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two."

Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets Per Hour at Peak
Coverage of the protests: Twitter 1, CNN 0
America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution
The repercussions of a 'Twitter revolution'
Doubting Twitter: Let's not get carried away about its role in Iran's demonstrations