The Strange Battlefields of Twitter - Part 1

First off, I do love Twitter. As a supplement to the mainstream media, it's vital. But, if anything the last few weeks, it has shown it can't replace it. Citizen journalism in general made its bones recently, but it also became clear how important it is to have trained journalists vetting the material, checking the background, the sources, the assertions. Not that all members of the MSM do this well, but the best are very, very good at clearing the smoke away and getting at some sort of truth.

Still, Twitter proved to be a great listening post on the world -- not just twitter but all the "social media," bringing together a "Twitarmy" worldwide to help and support the Iranian protesters. The Iranians kept the world informed of their view of events, risking everything to bring out videos and photos. The foreigners found proxies to try to protect Tweeters in Iran, organized protests for them, Tweeted and RT'd links to photos, videos, MSM news stories. It was exuberant and invigorating watching this worldwide wave of revolution take on tyrants.

But things got dark very quickly.

People were beat and killed in the streets, hauled off to prison with no word to their families, and arrested in their homes, often after being tracked down online through the social media.

The regime was a little late to the online game but entered it with ferocity, and suddenly Twitter was crawling with spies, intelligence, counterintelligence, pro-regime trolls, ideological warriors, spammers, porn princesses, hackers and other troublemakers. What had been a cyberwar of ideas, information and support turned into a real battlefield in the larger Cyberwar, starring the same players and hangers-on as real world conflicts, and with real victims.

The intelligence people and their supporters blasted forth with disinformation and outright propaganda. Seconds after the Tehran government would announce something, the army of regime tweeters would be hard at work spreading the party line to the world, word for word in many cases, pausing at their long row of databanks at the Ministry of Interior only for Coca Colas and prayers. By now, the Iranian protesters were effectively silenced by the regime, many disappeared, many hiding, internet and phone blocked for the rest. Very little could be confirmed, and this made it easier for the regime to engage in a sickening crackdown away from the world's eyes, and for its counterintelligence to spread their toxins around the internet and create a fog to help hide it.

Very quickly, the obvious agents and spammers were marked as [#trollfail] and [#twitspam, #spam123] and blocked, but not before Green supporters outside Iran, fresh from watching videos of a bloody crackdown, had blasted back, so a lot of people were beating each other over the head with clubs online by trading vicious insults.

The second level was smarter. They set up accounts with green icons and information that made them sound like protesters or their supporters, and their initial tweets were anti-regime and pro-opposition. They gained followers and followed others and once they had their trust, they began to use them to retweet stories that questioned protesters and gave credit to the regime and/or which farmed IP addresses or spread viruses. It took a while longer to weed these people out and by then, a lot of damage had already been done.

At the top of this group they were much, much smarter and much, much scarier. This elite cybercorps emerged a little later, having lurked and studied the #iranelection thread first. That's when some of us met The Hacker and learned way too much about Cyberwar and Disinformation.

To be continued.