Google, Facebook move up launches in Persian to help Iranian reformists

Google launched its Persian automatic translation service Friday just hours after Facebook announced a beta-version of the social networking site, because of the ongoing protests in Iran over election results that gave incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, a second term.

"We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa, increasing everyone's access to information," Franz Och, principal scientist, wrote on the company's blog.

The California-based company, which also owns the video sharing site YouTube, moved up the launch of its 42nd language in beta version as did Facebook. Och said Google was "launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times," adding that it was optimized for English-Farsi translations.

Facebook, popular with reformists who used it to build support for their candidate and disseminate information after the results, announced late Thursday night that the site would be available in Farsi, allowing Iranian users to navigate in their native language.

"Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath," Eric Kwan, a Facebook engineer working to localize the site, wrote on Facebook's official blog.

Facebook Persian was "already in translation before worldwide attention turned to the Iranian elections, but because of the sudden increase in activity we decided to launch it sooner than planned. This means that the translation isn't perfect, but we felt it was important to help more people communicate rather than wait," said Facebook.

Google also relaxed restrictions on violent and graphic videos from the protests in Iran posted to YouTube in recognition of the critical roll user-generated content was playing in the country, where foreign media have been banned from covering the protests.

"In general, we do not allow graphic or gratuitous violence on YouTube," the company said in a statement. "However, we make exceptions for videos that have educational, documentary, or scientific value. The limitations being placed on mainstream media reporting from within Iran make it even more important that citizens in Iran be able to use YouTube to capture their experiences for the world to see."

The visas of most foreign journalists, typically granted for seven days, ran out earlier in the week and were not renewed in an attempt by the government to control coverage of the largest demonstrations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Despite media frenzy and the re-discovery of Twitter it's nothing terribly new, especially for tech savvy Iranian youth who have already created one of the most dynamic blogospheres in the world. Activists Moldova, China, Burma/Myanmar, Egypt to name but a few have all used citizen journalism tools and social media to further their cause and circumvent varying levels of government censorship and control.

But the story of anti-government protesters using new media tools - which just happen to have emerged from American companies -- fits into the framework of Iran created by the West, especially the United States, as an authoritarian religious state that needs to be reformed. So the mainstream media has amplified the voices and perspective of reformers, and largely focused on one side while offering very little examination of either pro-government rallies or pro-Ahmedinejad voters and where their voices fit in the turmoil. So actually Ahmedinejad's attempt to control coverage seems to hace backfired because I doubt that pro-government demonstrators are exerting the same amount of effort to get their perspective and images and videos out to the world public as the reformer foes.

Throughout the week, supporters of the protesters around the world had been making their own computers available as proxies to Iranians who wanted to evade government censors. These people have been publishing the IP addresses of their computers to public forums like Twitter, offering them as so-called proxy servers. continued Internet activity from Iran was a testament to the durability of the Internet and the commitment of Iranians to get their story out despite the government crackdown.

The vast majority of bloggers are young, and the youth were overwhelmingly in support of Mousavi, especially city-based affluent youth, who are also more likely to be technologically savvy with access to private Internet connections and the technical know-how to use proxy servers to get around state censorship. Thus the citizen journalism coming out of Iran is skewed by the population that is producing it, and thus an incomplete picture of sentiment in Iran. That said, youth make up some 60% of the Iranian population

The government is fighting back with the same methods. Ahmediniejad supporters have sought to infiltrate reformists online, passing themselves off as reformists while posting news and views sympathetic to the pro-government side. Users on Twitter sent out false tweets purporting to be from a Western journalist with a major network. But he told me his followers quickly surmised the tweet from persian_guy was a ploy and sent out warnings accordingly. Lists of impersonators are kept and updated for everyone to be aware of.

The Revolution will be Twittered... this time in Iran

Iranian activists successfully got Twitter to suspend a planned interruption of service today because it has become an indispensable communication tool. Twitter and the other new media applications of the day -- Facebook, Flikr, YouTube and all -- have once again become indispensable tools in the repertoires of contention of activists in a less-than-democratic country.

So when Twitter announced Monday it would temporarily suspend the service for an hour the next day it immediately spurred a wave of requests not to take away what has become a key communication and organizational tool for post-election activism. Iran has taken press credentials from foreign media and kicked them out of the country and banned their broadcasts. It shut Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau and imprisoned journalists. But it ca't stop Twitter, which works via Internet and mobile phones and is too dispersed and instantaneous and pervasive to block. So real information and images are getting out.

“@twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down,” wrote Moussavi1388, a feed with nearly 11,000 followers that serves as a virtual newsroom, providing information about protests and press conferences. People began posting tweets about the need to prevent the planned outage and shortly after 4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday morning in Iran, the company announced it would suspend the planned upgrade in acknowledgment of its role in facilitating communication in and out of Iran.

Messages with #IranElection, a tag that enables users to search for all tweets on that subject, was the most popular tag on Twitter Tuesday, with more than 70 new posts a minute coming in Tuesday night. Tehran was the second most popular.

Mosavi’s Facebook page, which lists his current position as “president” or Iran, has more than 54,000 members posting pictures and videos that are helping to document the largest protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution as well as government violence that has left at least eight activists dead.

But blogs and Twitter feeds can also be seen by governmental authorities, prompting a campaign Tuesday evening to encourage people around the world to change their profiles to help protect activists in Iran.

“Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30” read the tweets sent by hundreds of users in an effort to make it more difficult for the government to track down those blogging inside Iran.

This is certainly not the first time Twitter has helped activists organize, as I've written many posts about its use in Egypt in particular (it has also been used in Moldova, Lebanon, China, etc). But of course, my detailed research is on Egypt, so if you want to read more about how activists in the Middle East use Twitter click here!

Hackers crash official Iran news sites: Exclusive

My team and I discovered this morning that several official Iranian news sites were down after a Facebook note went out telling supporters to download a file that would cause denial of service and crash the sites.

From the article I just wrote and posted on Al Arabiya about the hacking, which followed just a day after Iran officials closed Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau for a week.

"Iranians sympathetic to reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, who lost his election bid against the incumbent president, fought back against a government crackdown on media by hacking official news websites Sunday.

Activists dissatisfied with what they say were fraudulent elections that saw President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad elected to a second term with a landslide 63 percent of the vote, organized a denial of service campaign through Facebook that caused the websites of several official news agencies to crash.

The official IRNA and FARS news agencies websites could not be displayed for several hours in the morning, Press TV’s site delivered a server busy message while the official parliament site, Majlis.ir, gave an unending still working message.

The websites of IRIB, the official broadcaster, Sepah News, the Revolutionary Guards newspaper and Kehan, the conservative government mouthpiece, were also unavailable.

A note posted on Facebook urged supporters dissatisfied with the vote results to download a file called “giveourvoteback” that would send requests to the various official websites effectively creating a denial of service because of too many server requests and crashing the sites.

Facebook, used by supporters of rival reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi to rally support, was blocked in the weeks leading up to the election and in the wake of post-election demonstrations. But Iranians at home, using proxies, and abroad fought back by causing the denial of service of several official government news sites.

The campaign came amid the third day of violent protests and a continued government crackdown on the media, especially foreign press. (for the rest of the article click here)

So... yesterday Iran told Al Arabiya that we would not be able to broadcast from Tehran for the next week. Conveniently this would prevent coverage of the enormous protests that have wracked the capital and other cities for the past three days since the election results were announced. Reports are that they are the biggest in a decade if not since the Islamic Revolution in Iran...

Iran closes Al Arabiya's offices in Tehran

Iran closes Al Arabiya's offices in Tehran
DUBAI (Courtney C. Radsch)

Iranian authorities closed down Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau Sunday afternoon amid heightened tensions in the violent aftermath of a disputed election victory by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmedinijad over leading reformist rival Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Shared via AddThis

Election report: Lebanon heads to the polls for historic election

The cars struggled to pass each other in the long line of cars maneuvering on the narrow mountain road into the village of Mechan to the school that served as its polling station.

Jeeps filled with veiled women and bearded men pulled up to unload their passengers, ferried by bus from their homes in Syria to vote for Hezbollah in an historic election that drew an estimated 10 percent of voters from abroad to vote in the parliamentary elections.

A sheikh in white headdress was the first to arrive, and every few minutes another carload arrived to drop off some 200 voters who had made the five-hour trek to dip their fingers in purple ink and cast their ballots.

Mechan gets to elect three representatives: one Christian and two Shias. Lebanon’s democratic system requires a rigid adherence to parliamentary representation based on sectarian allocations to each of the country’s 18 religious factions. Muslims get 64 seats and Christians the other half of the 128 seats in parliament.

“We came to have our voices heard,” Mohamed Chamas told Al Arabiya, explaining why he had travelled from Syria to cast his vote in his hometown.

Lebanese must vote for one of the 580 candiates in one of 26 districts, which is determined by the hometown of their father or husband’s family as recorded on their identity cards, regardless of where they live. 580 candidates were running

Several youth in dressed in the bright red shirts of government supports stood just above the village school where people lined up for an hour to cast their vote while others dressed in yellow vest emblazoned with the green machine gun logo of Hezbollah stood watch across the street.

A cacophony of car horns attested to the passion of a society split between a Western-backed government loyal to former Prime Mineter Rafik al-Hariri’s Future movement and that of the Syrian and Iranian-backed opposition loyal to Christian General Michel Aoun and the Shiite party Hezbollah.

Cars draped in the red, white and green of the March 14 movement – which included Saad Hariri’s Future movement and Samer Geagea’s Lebanese Forces and Amin Gameyel’s Phalangists -- and tooted a distinctive honk while those draped in the orange of Aoun or the yellow and green of Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah totted another theme.

The honks echoed through the empty streets, where shuttered stores and restaurants attested to the heightened tensions of a body politic concerned about clashes between rivals.

The army was out in full force as tanks, strategically positioned at polling stations and throughout the cities, and soldiers in fatigues bearing rifles and machine funs kept a wary eye on residents they hoped would be dissuaded from causing any trouble.

Nearly 3.5 million people were expected to vote Sunday, with 10 percent of them returning from abroad to fulfill their civic duty. With an estimated population of about five million, their impact could be critical.

The authorities have suggested that some 16 million Lebanses citizens abroad will be able to vote through their embassies in the next election, but for the 2009 election they would have to travel back to a homeland that has been struggling to recover from a 20-year civil war that ended in 1991 and a 2006 Israeli war that decimated much of its recovery efforts.

European Union election observers were in Lebanon to monitor and assess the integrity of the elections, but even before election day their were reports of cheating and fraud.

One observer stationed in Byblos, the port city 35 km ( miles) north of Beirut, told Al Arabiya that fake identity cards that were exact duplicates of the real ones required to vote were found in Beirut, xxx and xxx.

In the days leading up to election day the various parties distributed ballots to the faithful isting the slate of candidates they supported. In Batroun, a beachside city in the north of Lebanon home to a mix of Shia and Christian residents, ballots with disappearing ink were found, adding to the controversy over tactics used by the government-aligned forces to swing the election in their favor.

A week ago a new March 14 candidate named Gibran Bassil entered the race. But there was already a Gibran Bassil running with the March 8 opposition. The pro-government alliance hoped the confusion created by having two candidates with the same name would work in their favor, forcing the more well-know opposition candidate to be forced to use a third name as an identifier and thus invalidating ballots that did not distinguish the two.

But the day before the election the authorities, looking to French law for guidance, ruled that the lesser-known candidate would be the only one required to use a third name – his father’s—and thus backfiring.

As the polls closed at 7 p.m., Michel Aoun’s supporters in were erecting a stage in the historic downtown area in preparation for what they hoped would be a victory celebration.

In the 2005 elections the March 14th alliance gained 71 seats while the opposition won 57.

Obama gives Americans blueprint for Muslim ties

Americans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, listened with interest to their president’s address to the Muslim world Thursday in Cairo in which he reiterated the need for mutual interest and respect between the United States and Muslims that has been a theme throughout his young presidency.

Read my article for Al Arabiya Obama gives Americans blueprint for Muslim ties for more.

News | Egypt's Grand Mufti bans Muslim use of WMDs

News | Egypt's Grand Mufti bans Muslim use of WMDs

Shared via AddThis