Twitter for freedom
I never thought I'd get a Twitter account. But I've made a brief exception. Here's why, and also why I urge everyone reading this to follow suit:
Twitter is being used by Iranian protesters to organize their rallies. Naturally, the security forces are searching Twitter to find their quarry so they can do all manner of nasty things to them. One small way that those of us who are removed from the situation can help these protesters is to intentionally spam the Twitter search engine by having your account show up as Tehran-based, thus diluting the search results to make them less usable to authorities.
1. Open a Twitter account if you haven't already.
2. In your settings, change your location and timezone to Tehran. The timezone menu specifically denotes Tehran time, so this is easy.
3. Don't keep yourself private and thus unavailable to the search engine.
That's all you have to do, I think. Probably don't even have to tweet, although one tweet might help, just to get the search engine's attention. I am not going to make real use of my account, so no, I have no followers and never intend on having any. But I've felt pretty impotent over this amazing series of events in Iran, and this is something I, and all of you, can do to make a difference. It takes 5 minutes and might just literally save lives. So go for it.
Twitter is being used by Iranian protesters to organize their rallies. Naturally, the security forces are searching Twitter to find their quarry so they can do all manner of nasty things to them. One small way that those of us who are removed from the situation can help these protesters is to intentionally spam the Twitter search engine by having your account show up as Tehran-based, thus diluting the search results to make them less usable to authorities.
1. Open a Twitter account if you haven't already.
2. In your settings, change your location and timezone to Tehran. The timezone menu specifically denotes Tehran time, so this is easy.
3. Don't keep yourself private and thus unavailable to the search engine.
That's all you have to do, I think. Probably don't even have to tweet, although one tweet might help, just to get the search engine's attention. I am not going to make real use of my account, so no, I have no followers and never intend on having any. But I've felt pretty impotent over this amazing series of events in Iran, and this is something I, and all of you, can do to make a difference. It takes 5 minutes and might just literally save lives. So go for it.