THE TELEGRAPH: Iran's crackdown proves that the 'Twitter revolution' has made things worse
Almost a month on from Iran’s presidential election, it is now time to recognise that the so-called “Twitter revolution” has utterly failed to achieve anything - save dead and injured young Iranians, and up to 2,000 new political prisoners. President Ahmadinejad retains power after a violent crackdown. There has been no recount of the votes. And the blatantly rigged election results have been upheld.
So what went wrong? Well, I would argue that the answer is twofold. Firstly we need to accept that there was a hell of a lot of hype surrounding the online freedom emerging in Iran. Despite what Bobbie Johnson wrote in The Observer, Tweets do not “shake” the political world. More accurately, we have just witnessed a mini dotcom boom and bust: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr were seen to be “powerful political tools”. They aren’t. Especially when they are only being used by a relatively small urban elite. >>> Will Heaven* | Wednesday, July 08, 2009
*Will Heaven is a 21-year-old journalist who writes about politics and religion.
