Twitter's Iran Role Is All Hype

Tech-loving journalists need to chill out about Twitter’s supposed role in Iran’s unrest, writes Jack Shafer of Slate. “I’ve found it more noise than signal,” he writes. Twitter’s already produced a lot of erroneous stories—like the 3 million people tweeters claimed were at one demonstration, or the house arrest of Mousavi, or the annulment of the election by authorities.

There’s a potential dark side to the Twitter Revolution as well. Twitter’s a poor tool for organizing dissent against a repressive regime, because that regime can read your tweets. During Moldova’s “Twitter revolution,” there’s evidence that the government used the microblogger to spread disinformation of its own. Authorities can—and probably soon will—start sending organizational tweets, then busting anyone who shows up.