Picture by respres.

I read a great post today on Global Voices Advocacy presenting the incredible power of Twitter as a mechanism for enabling communication and better networking despite state repression.

So much is said about Twitter, but not a huge amount about its emerging role in the Middle East.  So it’s great to see this conversation emerge.  It will no doubt enrich and forward the ‘what have bloggers done for the Middle East’ discussion – which has started to feel stale.

But two important caveats need to be made about Twitter in the Middle East before we simply assume that it already plays a critical social role.

First, the user base. In a post published last month, Spot on PR estimated there are only just over 14,000 Twitter users in the region.  Forty percent of these users are in the UAE, and well over half are in the Gulf. Just 11 percent are in the Levant – reminding us that this tool is largely used by web users in rich countries and geeks + activists in poorer ones.

Plus when you compare these stats to Facebook – you start to realise that in fact the tool has some way to go.  According to O’Reilly Research, Facebook boasts 1.8 million users in Egypt alone.  Egyptians love the internet, they love social networking, but to date they are not mad about Twitter or don’t know about it.

Second, Twitter crucially lacks social translation and markup tools.  Social translation is key to enabling Middle East users reach wider audiences – Google MT API is just not enough when you think that ICANN predicts the next 20 million Arab users of the web will not be speaking English.

Markup is important for enabling users to better share provenance information about important Twitter voices – crucial in the Middle East where trust and credibility are key.

Nevertheless an important article this one – well worth a read.

President Hosni Mubarak (left) and son Gamal at the World Economic Forum this year. Picture courtesy the World Economic Forum.

He’s widely tipped to be the next President of Egypt.  He’s the policy chief in the ruling National Democratic Party (the NDP). And now he’s talking to Egyptians directly through the social web.

Today Gamal Mubarak, son of incumbent President Hosni Mubarak, will address questions posted on Facebook through a live video webcast.

It’s all part of an effort to build Mubarak junior’s credibility and support base, ahead of any future tussle for the presidency.

It may sound new, but the spectacle fits well within a long standing communications drive from within the NDP.

The Egyptian regime has long learnt to be media savvy as part of an effort to present itself as modern, democratic and open.

Back in the presidential elections of 2005, Hosni Mubarak’s communications were slick and ubiquitous.

Brand Mubarak was built as stable, formidable, progressive and authentic. His slogan was ‘Leadership … and the passage to the future.’

Linking his image and party to the color green and the crescent – both symbols of Islam – built his brand as authentic. He was presented as a friendly father businessman figure.

Allied to this was a mammoth communications campaign that presented the party as open and responsive.

A reporter covering the campaign in 2005, Vivian Salama, wrote:

Gone are the days, the party proclaimed, where politicians dodge questions, act aloof and brush off the need for responses. The scheme was simple—a journalist who needed a quote, a response, or any information concerning the NDP would get all he/she needed with a simple phone call.

Inside the campaign, media professionals were hired to grow web and mobile outreach right up to election day.

Usama Najeeb was one of them.  He described how the campaign was ‘was carefully planned and built on a scientific basis’.  The NDP went to great lenghts to monitor media and respond through more than one channel.

Fast forward four years and Gamal Mubarak is adopting a similar approach.

His website is called ‘Sharek’ (partcipate) to suggest that his politics are participatory and responsive to the needs of Egyptians.

He’s using social media like YouTube, Flickr and Facebook to interact with an increasingly important middle class that has jumped on new social networking opportunities online.

To some extent this reflects a need to compete with opposition groups – notably the Muslim Brotherhood – who have similarly adopted new media techniques to communicating their agenda.

But will his politics be any different under the spotlight of social media?

This is a big test.  Blogs and networking tools have dramatically increased the potential for new communities of thought to emerge online.  They have given opportunities for activists to fine-tune their communication techniques and for many other web users to engage in participatory debate.

Yet the policies of Hosni Mubarak’s regime since 2005 do not suggest that new media have had the impact many assumed they would.

If there was ever a good opportunity to test the well trodden argument about the potential for social media to breathe new life into the participatory politics of developing countries, it is here.

Join the webcast at http://www.sharek.eg/ from 7pm local time tonight.

Picture by .faramarz from www.Flickr.com

Twitter is primarily a real-time broadcasting tool.

A networking tool yes – but I can’t believe the majority of users conduct prim and polite getting-to-know-you tea parties when they are following hundreds of people.

Still, as a broadcasting tool comprising connected individuals with established reputations to maintain, it has a powerful potential for social change.

And so it proved in Iran – where Twitter once again came into its own as a vehicle for documenting events with utterly compelling immediacy and – initially at least – authenticity.

Read a short arc of tweets from @Change_For_Iran and you sense the utter fear and mounting anger faced by students in a Tehran dorm attacked by ’security’ on Tuesday:

4:09am from dormitory building of university of Tehran, we will wait for day light and hoping people of amirabad help us out #iranelection
about 1 hour ago from web

using freegate now, nothing else working. no power in most of the buildings & cellphones & land lines are out again. #iranelection
about 1 hour ago from web

there is nothing we can’t do right now, police & basij forces are waiting outside blocking anyone from getting in or out #iranelection
about 1 hour ago from web

trying hard to sleep, there are rumors about karoubi’s march toward here! if it is true there is still hope for us! #iranelection
40 minutes ago from web

we have now some students with urgent need of medical attention I’m calling out to all ppl who can come here don’t leave us #iranelection
31 minutes ago from web

all university’s own security and personnel already evacuated by police, there are only us students in here right now. #iranelection
27 minutes ago from web

No reporter can match that.

It helps explain why the US felt compelled to urge Twitter to delay scheduled downtime.

DHW9072393's photostream from www.Flickr.com

But for all that has been written and said about Twitter in Iran over the past week, the success it has enjoyed has been short lived.

If Twitter has provided value by enabling citizens to report on the spot in crisis situations (and against repressive governments), Twitter users have often sought to undo this value from within.

Don’t get me wrong – the main problem with Tweeting from Iran right now is the security threat posed by the regime to those who would support the opposition’s goals of a fresh election.

The crackdown has hit big foreign media and small Iranian media (the Twittersphere) alike – though as is all-too-often the case in broadly authoritarian environments it is the local people who suffer most, and have most to lose by pursuing their reporting.

But, inadvertently, well-intentioned Twitter enthusiasts around the world are conspiring with the Iranian regime to make the situation worse.

For example, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing posts tips for ‘helping the protesters’ in what it calls a ‘cyberwar guide’:

Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.

Keep you bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don’t retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.

Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become ‘Iranians’ it becomes much harder to find them.

Don’t blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don’t publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don’t signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind…

This guide is utterly contradictory and self-defeating.  Never was there more total nonsense written in the name of protecting people in danger.

The simple truth is – we cannot protect protesters in danger.  They take their security in their own hands.  As Marc Lynch has observed, it is governments who need to do more to protect online activists living under authoritarian regimes.

There are means for protecting your identity online – for example Ethan Zuckerman’s guide to anonymous blogging.

.Faramarz from www.Flickr.com

But as any investigative journalist will tell you, even email is not secure. So using Twitter puts you at risk – much like using Facebook for activism.  Then why use it?

Twitter is a brilliant real-time broadcasting tool for enabling information to get out when other sources (foreign media) are constrained.

So if Twitter is going to mean anything at all in all of this, it’s crucial the good information gets out to the people who can do something about it.

But all the tips for protecting protesters outlined in the Cyberwar guide undermine the ability of Twitter users to distinguish good information from bad.

The guide suggests that the disinformation of the Iranian regime is bad (which is true), but then argues that the disinformation of a broad Twitter public (becoming Iranian by setting your location to Tehran) is good (which is false).

At the beginning of the protests, searching Twitter for tweets from Tehran consistently produced results.  Now it is jammed with rubbish.

That means the good information is harder to find.  But, let’s be frank, it really doesn’t make it any harder for the Iranian regime to find those tweeting from the dorms of the capital.

The cyberwar guide suggests that using only one or two hashtags will keep the conversation undiluted – when in fact the reverse is true.

As a hashtag gains notoriety, so it dilutes the useful content (tweets from protesters in Iran).

I even saw lunatics posting tweets like ‘So sorry Steve Jobs is dead #iranelection’ – as @animalcollector notes.

animalcollector: sad that #iranelection being used to hawk so much nonsense (steve jobs dead, NK invaded SK, CIA control gravity), but Σ(truth) >> Σ(filth)

The guide then ludicrously urges us not to ’signpost’ the key Twitter users from Iran.

So what’s the point in using Twitter?

Twitter, in its networking element, is all about viral broadcasting. This aspect of Twitter helps the message get out to where its needed much like a well-oiled financial system, it gives credibility to the original Twitter user in Iran, and it helps build a loose international network around valuable voices.

All that is lost if we simply quietly whisper who’s worth watching.

After all, Twitter’s main social action is ‘following’. It is inter-personal spying on a mass scale.

Iranian security people will be able to follow the people they want to even if we feign otherwise, and impede many other innocent users’ access to important voices in the process.