Very briefly, preceding the recent elections in Iran, many leftists had been organizing protests and what not via facebook and other social networks. However, Iranian censors quickly jumped on this trend and blocked facebook’s site from the entire country. Following the elections, protests ensued and were organized and publicized on Twitter, which the luddite bureaucracy failed to block in time. Iranian censors are now combing the twitter network for dissidents in a Stasi like fashion. In retaliation, people around the world have tried to throw a wrench in their efforts:
Click Twitter Settings in the top right, change your Home City to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3:30 Tehran Time.
It’s likely that the first method of filtering will relate to the location of the user. If we flood twitter with accounts that all appear to be from Tehran, we build a bigger data cloud that the censors have to sift through in their search for Iranian dissidents. This is not full proof, but will likely buy them some time in the same way that searching “John Smith” on face book will yield a frustratingly large selection of people to search through.
Click Twitter Settings and change your birth name to something Iranian. You can find a list of Iranian names here.
Should the censors end up on your account, your American (or whatever) name will be a likely clue that you aren’t worth their time.
Follow someone posting from Iran and repost their material.
Content is the ultimate tell tale of who is and isn’t a dissident in this situation. By reposting someone else’s content censors be forced to look at the timestamp of the tweet to decipher who is the original writer. Ideally, your follow up tweet would be so close to the initial posting time that the two become indiscriminate. You can also go a step further and, if they have uploaded a photo, save the file and re upload it via your account (merely linking to their account is liable to clue the censors in).
Edit: Be careful in reposting, there have been reports of false accounts going up to provide misinformation to the prostestors. More info here. Do not repost things verbatim, paraphrase. Also, when retweeting to not use the original posters name.
Even in the event that Iran blocks twitter as they did Facebook, it is likely that the censors will still have access to the site, and will continue to comb it. Sustaining your efforts could serve to further delay the censors.
Obviously, none of these methods are full proof. The idea is to buy any of the said dissidents time to hide, evacuate or so on…
"If only for an instant, we will unite what you have divided. Our calls will be heard from shore to shore, through borders, races, classes and languages, For we bear a torch that burns one hundred thousand years strong, we carry the flame of revolution.”