Iran & Social Media: Behind the Scenes

Social media is playing a key part in reporting the election crisis in Iran.

As the authorities have restricted foreign media, newsrooms have been forced to rely more on social media, and more importantly twitter for sources of information.

But could the openness of platforms like Twitter make them a victim of their own success?

Hashtags are a way for people using twitter to mark the subject of their tweet, letting others know they are talking about a popular topic. By using a hashtag, other people can search for all information marked with the same tag, and see a real-time picture of what people are saying about one topic.

According to WhatTheHashtag, a twitter statistics site, the term “IranElection” has been tweeted about 464,449 times or an average of nearly 70,000 times per day since the polls ended. These tweets have given insights into what’s going on, and linked to video footage on youtube, some of which has been broadcast on TV.

But dig a little deeper into the statistics, and you find that over 50% of tweets about IranElection are not first hand information. Twitter allows users to repeat other people’s tweets and send them on to their friends, who can then go on and repeat this to their friends. There is no control mechanism for fact or fiction and misinformation can spread quickly, especially in times of conflict.

WhatTheHashtag estimates nearly 80,000 people have been tweeting about IranElection, but it seems  to be a case of he who shouts loudest gets heard.

Some of the biggest contributors to the IranElection hashtag have posted over 1000 times per day but much of these contributions are repeats of others tweets. This makes it increasingly difficult to separate the news from the noise.

Some are even using the popularity of hashtags as a marketing tool. Social Media Today reported one furniture retailer that recently started using twitter, and in a bid to get noticed decided to tag their tweets with the most popular trends. The website reported that this policy quickly backfiring, as their marketing tweets became associated with IranElection. This use of hashtags for marketing was quickly criticised by many on Twitter and described as “damaging to their brand”.

Social media has played a key part in reporting the elections crisis in Iran. It’s brought images and video out of Iran and out to the world faster than ever before, despite attempts to block it. Using hashtags to follow the pace of a developing story is fast becoming mainstream, along with the spam that comes with it.

But Iran’s story shows the potential for a young web-savvy generation to break through and tell the story.

Alex Wood is a social media consultant for agency:2, a leading social media agency based in London.