The twitter account I had neglected for so long came to good use since the fraudulent election results on Friday. I found out that when all else was down and it was hard to call or chat on other social network sites with friends, family and people in Iran I could find them on twitter. Once I started I could not give up. I found that there were students from Isfahan, Tehran and Rasht that were desperate to have their plight and struggle covered and disseminated. Every second a new tweet would describe in 140max. characters what was going in the streets and universities of Iran. In a matter of hours #IranElection (written like this in twitterese)became that most discussed topic and has remained so since. Twitter users forced CNN-with a campaign were you placed #cnnfail in your tweet- to start covering the situation in Iran more closely.
I found I myself sending tweets from iranians to news networks and personalities. Soon everyone was talking of how tweets from Iran were influencing media and getting CNN’s attention. (see nytimes article) Whether all this helps the movement or not it certainly makes those tweeting from Iran, witnessing the human rights abuses in the besieged dorms and streets of Iran, feel like someone, in this case thousands of twitter users, is hearing their stories, seeing their photos and videos.
It has been an amazing few days, and Iranians of all walks of life and political parties all over the world are watching with different degrees of enthusiasm and hope. Twitter is a great place to spread the word of the struggle for civil rights in Iran that is unraveling as I write this. So join me on Twitter to make this cyber support for the movement in Iran even bigger. For those of you not on twitter already: all you need to do is go to Twitter.com and sign up with a user name and a password and start tweeting! You can follow me on Twitter, username: SetarehSabety
In the words of one tweeter: The Revolution will not be televised it will be twitterized!
