Photo Credit: kappazeta

I enjoy the occasional random fact. I just heard about this one today and found it pretty interesting, so I thought I’d share.

In June of 2009 when protests were occurring in Iran over their election controversy, Twitter was scheduled to do maintenance to their servers and as a result the site would be unavailable for several hours. Iranian media sources were kicked out of the main cities of Iran, and protesters were the only source of information to the outside world. Besides using Twitter, they were also posting information on other social networking sites like YouTube and Flickr. The U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay their maintenance since it would interfere with the flow of information from Iran. As a result, Twitter delayed their maintenance to 2 PM PT the next day.

This is a pretty strong indication of where social media has come, where the government is almost solely dependent on the information posted through these sites (since they don’t have an embassy in Iran). Pretty amazing.

The biggest revelation is that the State Department asked Twitter not to go down at its original time last night in order to allow Iranians to tweet out what’s happening in their cities.

Mashable

[...] sites like Twitter and Facebook, are providing the United States with critical information in the face of a crackdown on journalists by Iranian authorities.

CNN – Anderson Cooper 360