By Alex Alper

“Was it a Twitter revolution? I don’t think so, because I didn’t check my Twitter until I got back to the states,” said Iason Athanasiadis, a Tehran-based British journalist and political analyst, as he was referring to a disputed presidential election in Iran this year.

Athanasiadis, who spoke at a SIPA lunch discussion, “The Twitter Uprising?” on October 15, was arrested and detained for allegations of fomenting revolution while he was covering the Iranian elections in June.

He was generally treated well by his captors during his captivity, he said, except for being “roughed up” during his initial capture at the airport. He was released after three weeks of interrogation.

“They joked about pulling out my fingernails,” he added, “but that was all”.

While Twitter has much potential for information sharing and fomenting “velvet revolutions” for those “tech-savvy” enough to use it, this networking tool is an anger maximizer, according to Athanasiadis.

“The Internet is not a place for constructive dialogue. The idea that social media can lead to constructive dialogue is a bit optimistic,” he said.

Athanasiadis described the lead-up to the Iranian government’s vision for the elections as the antithesis of what happened. “It’s usually very hard for foreign journalists to get permission to enter the country, but 500 had been allowed in for the elections to document the splendor of Islamic Democracy — to show that it was just as much democratic as Islamic.”

Just after polls closed, two Iranian papers that posted stories that President Ahmadinejad won by 63% were immediately pulled, leading people to speculate that the election may have been rigged. A day later the police were allegedly harassing journalists, and violence pervaded in the northern neighborhoods of Tehran, which international media was able to cover.

“It was the biggest embarrassment, crisis, in the last 30 years,” said Athanasiadis.

By Saturday violent protests had erupted. To quell dissenting voice, Athansasiadis recalled, the government censured all the newspapers. Restrictions were also imposed on the movement of journalists. The service for cell phones was shut down. “That made it really hard to coordinate street movements,” he added.

As a result of the government suppression, Twitter became the dominant tool to facilitate the coordination of protests. But, according to Anthanasiadis., it was also a good way to spread misinformation. “Its hard to know which sources are accurate and which aren’t. You could be two blocks from a protest and you do not know it was happening.”

Some supporters of Ahmadinejad also used Twitter to thwart the protests, said Anthanasiadis. “Strange messages appeared telling people to gather in parts of the city where the security guards had already arranged themselves.”

Twitting, for Anthanasiadis, could be detrimental to the cause.  “It creates a danger — a strong perception that people were in the right,” he added. “It’s not to say that the elections weren’t rigged, but once everyone thinks in the same way, healthy debates become suppressed.”