A picture posted on Twitter’s photo-sharing website TwitPic by a user, Gita, shows supporters of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi taking part in a rally in Tehran on Wednesday. (AFP/Twitter)

Washington, June 17: On Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old US state department official, Jared Cohen, emailed the social networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network.

The shutdown would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the tumultuous aftermath of the disputed presidential election.

The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the US government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.

“This was just a call to say: ‘It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?’” said P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

Twitter complied with the request, saying in a blog post on Monday that it put off the upgrade until 1.30am Wednesday in Tehran because its partners recognised “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran”. The network was working normally again after the stipulated time.

The Twitter blog entry did not mention any contact from state department officials. The state department’s request contrasts with recent comments from President Barack Obama that the US would not get involved in the matter.

But the state department said its request did not amount to meddling. Cohen, they noted, did not contact Twitter until three days after the vote was held and well after the protests had begun.

“This is completely consistent with our national policy,” Crowley said. “We are proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression.”

The episode demonstrates the extent to which the Obama administration views social networking as a new arrow in its diplomatic quiver. Secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton talks regularly about the power of e-diplomacy, particularly in places where the mass media are repressed.

Cohen, a Stanford University graduate who is the youngest member of the state department’s policy planning staff, has been working with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other services to harness their reach for diplomatic initiatives in Iraq and elsewhere.

Tehran has been buzzing with tweets, the posts of Twitter subscribers, sharing news on rallies, police crackdowns on protesters, and analyses of how the White House is responding to the drama.

It is hard to say how much twittering is actually going on inside Iran. The tweets circulated by expatriates in the US tend to be in English — the Twitter interface does not support the use of Farsi. And though many people may be sending tweets out of Iran, their use inside Iran may be low, some say.

“Twitter’s impact inside Iran is zero,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles. “Here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look... you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.”

Many users, logging on from outside Iran, said they changed their account’s location listing to Tehran, in a move to confuse government censors who might be trying to shut down communications from Iran.

However, an Iranian-American activist in Washington said that tweets from a handful of students have been instrumental in getting information to people outside Iran.

“The predominant information is coming from Twitter” since foreign reporters’ movement has been limited, she said. “They are relying on Iranians and others who are Twittering to get this information out to the mainstream media. A lot of people are coining what is happening in Iran as a Twitter revolution.”

Some information tweeted about planned gatherings, or about the shooting of a protester, has been confirmed by mainstream media. Other reports have been debunked or have proven impossible to verify.

There were also suspicions that some pro-government forces might be using new-media outlets to send out misinformation. One popular opposition site, Persiankiwi, warned its followers to ignore instructions from people with no record of reliable posts.

In addition to Twitter, YouTube has been a critical tool to spread videos from Iran when traditional media outlets have had difficulty filming the protests or the ensuing crackdown.

The BBC’s Persian-language television channel said that for a time on Tuesday, it was receiving about five videos a minute from amateurs, even though the channel is largely blocked within Iran. One showed pro-government militia members firing weapons at a rally.

“We’ve been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony,” said Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor. “The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over.”

Tech industry analyst Rob Enderle said Twitter might be more resistant to the Iranian government’s attempts to block access because users can post updates via a cellphone’s text-messaging service.

“Twitter is a unique property because it works easily with SMS,” Enderle said. “That gives it a resiliency that isn't shared by other online-only sites,” such as Facebook, he said.

To block Twitter use, he said, Iran would either have to shut down text messaging on a one-to-one basis, a tedious and time-intensive process, or shut down text messaging throughout the country.

New York Times News Service and LAT-WP