When Twitter fails, word-of-mouth comes to the rescue

Twitter has become a big success in Iran since the protests over the presidential election started. But with most networking sites shut down Iranians are now falling back on old fashioned word-of-mouth.

"Tweets" from Iran have gathered a huge amount of "followers" in the past few days. Tweets are short messages of maximum 140 characters each that are sent through the social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter, where you can choose to follow a person and receive their updates on the web or your cellphone. @Keyvan and @Mahdi are two Iranian twitterers who have been keeping the world informed about events in Tehran.

"There are tanks in the city," @Keyvan, whose identity is known to NRC Handelsblad, wrote in English on Sunday. "I'm off to vote; my whole family is wearing green," @Mahdi wrote on Friday about Mir Hossein Mousavi, whose campaign colour is green.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can play an important role in organising protests because of their ability to mobilise large groups of people in a very short amount of time. But now that the Iranian government has shut down many social networking sites their influence has been greatly diminished.

As always, there are ways to circumvent the censorship. Special software allows users to bypass the government filters. But the software tends to slow down the already slow internet in Iran, making it virtually inaccessible. Only a fraction of Iran's 22 million internet users still have access to the censored websites. Iranian twitterers do have many followers, but the majority of them are abroad, which makes them spectators of, rather than actors in the ongoing protests.

Facebook played an important role in Mousavi's campaign. Because the state media are in the hands of the government of president Ahmadinejad, Mousavi supporters turned to Facebook to plan meetings and announce the times and locations of their candidate's rallies.

"These have been the most digital elections ever," said Reza Badamchi, webmaster of Sepidedam.com, which has been putting Mousavi's speeches online. On Saturday, Badamchi's website was shut down; no official reason was given.

With cellphone and text messaging services shut down, newspapers closed, internet sites blocked and satelite TV transmissions jammed. the Iranians have gone back to the oldest way of getting news known to man: the grapevine.

Everyone, from motorcycle courier to Mercedes owner, is taking part in the news cycle. "The police posts on Jomhuri Street have been torched," said a pizza delivery boy. "There was shooting in my neighbourhood," said a taxi driver. "The kids in Sa’adat Abad are making Molotov cocktails," a teenager told his neighbours in the lobby of an apartment building.

On Tuesday afternoon a rally for Ahmadinejad supporters was announced on square where Mousavi supporters had planned their own rally two hours later. "All real Iranian will gather at 3 p.m.," a state television presenter said. "Is our meeting still on then?" asked a Mousavi supporter. Nobody knew. But then the phone - a landline - started ringing. The rally was on.