This past week has seen social media enter the war zone. Whether it is the Iranian twitter revolution or the use of social media by armed forces, social media has been constantly in news. Here’s a quick round up from the war zone.
The landslide victory for the serving Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the subsequent charges of rigging by the supporters of losing candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, gave rise to a mass unrest in Iran last week. Within no time the news spread across the world, and in an effort to control the situation, the Iranian government banned all foreign media from reporting the protests. In addition to this, most popular social networking and broadcasting sites like Facebook and YouTube were also blocked to prevent citizen reporting. This, however, has not managed to stop the flurry of information coming out of Iran. Thanks to Twitter and proxies, Iranian’s are sending out real time updates to the world.
Here are some stats to give you an idea of the magnitude of activity happening:
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June 16 saw as many as 221,744/ hour tweets around Iran
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There is a flurry of “Green Avataars” on twitter by people around the world in support of the Iranian protestors
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Moving from Iran to armed forces… Some bad news for net savvy Indian Army men. The Indian Army has warned its personnel against the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Orkut. This warning has been issued to prevent leak of classified information like place of posting, unit and rank to enemy agents. On the other hand the U.S. army has issued an order unblocking social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, for the first time, for its men. This move, they feel, will allow soldiers to 'tell the Army story' and facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information.
Progressive we must say…
All in all, a busy week for social media on the front line.
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