Tweeting the revolution

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:17:00 +0000

It all started at 10:40 p.m. on an otherwise quiet Sunday night. After talking about the Iranian election on and off for several hours, I saw a tweet in my Twitter feed that pointed out CNN's failure to cover the story. As an obviously rigged election in one of the world's most important countries was being perpetrated, America's oldest 24-hour news network was reporting primarily on consumers' problems in this country with digital TVs.

"Dear CNN: please report about Iran, not Twitter. #cnnfail #iranelection," a user by the name of nympholepsy wrote. The dual hashtags (the pound symbol before a subject, which allows users to search for all tweets on the topic) opened the door for me, a 25-year-old who had never even traveled to the Middle East, to become an activist in Iran.

It was the tag #cnnfail that first caught my attention. In 2000, the first presidential election for which I was truly cognizant, I watched as legitimate claims of voter suppression in my native state of Ohio and across the country were ignored by the mainstream media as conspiracy theories.

If the media failed, the populace was complicit. There were no street protests in Ohio that rocked the stability of our government, no mass movements against the subversion of our democracy.

Salon.com > Austin Heap

Tweeting the revolution