Twitter’s moral limit?

The Iranian election may well have exposed the two extremes of usefulness and moral integrity not only of the Internet, but of Twitter in particular.

There can be no doubt that Iranians have made great use of the combined web/mobile phone network to organise protests and distribute raw news footage, and these technologies have been central to the authorities’ considered response to the ongoing crisis.

Early in the affair it was widely reported that Twitter had postponed certain upgrades so there would be no service interruption to the organisers of the bush-fire like protests taking place across the country. Unwittingly, the Twitter admins became the guardians of a fragile, almost premature democracy movement that was gasping for the oxygen of publicity and effective communications. About a week ago you could tell a Twitter user from 20 paces -  they were the ones walking around with faintly self-satisfied grins all day long… confident that their last 140 characters really had changed the world.

While initially the effect was sustaining to the protesters, it could do little to halt the relentless screw that the authorities tightened in the following days – the expulsion of foreign journalists, the Orwellian surveillance of the Nokia Siemens phone network using the ‘Monitoring Centre’ (a government back-door into every mobile phone in the country, helpfully sold to Iran Telecom by Nokia itself in 2008 (gotta love the free market)), and the unshackling of the Basij militia all turned the tide inexorable against the pro-democracy movement.

The waves of that tide broke bloody-red on the dusty streets of Tehran this weekend with the summary execution of at least 10 people, most infamously the appalling up-close video death of ‘Neda’, a shockingly young and beautiful Iranian girl shown dying in the arms of her agonized father.

The horror of the moment defies explanation – it is intrusive and gory, war-pornography at its worst.

To respond to it therefore within a soulless Tweet of 140 characters seems trite, an arbitrary offense to the gravity of the event and the final, human emotions of Neda and her family, friends, and community.

Within 24 hours this brave woman’s death was reduced to the status of  a Twitter hash-tag and a cheap slogan – ‘The Angel of Iran’. Already her image has been reconstituted by a myriad of contradictory, even pointless causes that seek to somehow legitimise themselves in her reflected publicity – just as Twitter sought to legitimise itself in the unpleasant afterbirth of the Iranian election.

While Twitter has been quite useful, sometimes funny, and certainly pointless in the year or more I have been using it, it has never felt quite this… tainted.

For organising democracy movements, for contextualising appalling acts of violence, and for paying meaningful respects to the dead, it is simply the wrong tool for the job.

Public sector staff have blogging rights too…

The case of the UK of the police officer who was disciplined for maintaining an anonymous blog has dark overtones for all public sector employees (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/8104649.stm).

There is a body of opinion in the public sector that somehow commenting via blogs or online is inherently wrong – that it somehow circumvents a strong and true hierarchy in place within government departments. 

This is clearly not the case, as evidenced by the speed with which many departments and individual politicians have embraced various new media to engage with the citizenry, and also to disseminate information (both official and proposed). In Australia interim guidelines have been issued by the Australian Public Service Commission, which in essence state the obvious:

APS employees are entitled as citizens to do so (blog etc…), but they must avoid comment that might be interpreted as an official statement on behalf of their agency or that compromises perceptions of the employee’s ability to do his/her job in an unbiased or professional manner

This really is no different from any individual out there – if you pretend to be a company representative (or any fake ‘official’ person), then you are clearly misrepresenting yourself, and can mislead readers. If you go online and publicly challenge workplace decisions or belittle colleagues then, yes,  you are being ‘unprofessional’.

But the police blog did not breech this rule – it was anonymous, factual, and not a misrepresentation of the author or the events he witnessed. It might have contained opinion and individual interpretation, but that is the point – the author is ENTITLED to those views as a private citizen – this is the whole idea of democracy.

Of course if you go online and make bad jokes, brag, or make an idiot of yourself then you will lose respect at work – but that’s just as  likely to be the behaviour of someone who would piss people off  anyway in meetings, during lunch breaks, or just being themselves around others – all part of the rich (and yes, annoying/frustrating) tapestry of human relations where we are all randomly dumped together in the workplace.

To ban this type of online authoring is a step towards censorship that governments have no right to take – it is a step towards censoring phone calls, SMS’s, web browsing, and letters (why not – who knows WHAT you are saying…?). Before you know it, we end up with the Great Firewall of China (soon to extend to Australia maybe?)

The concept of whistle-blowing is essential to maintain a healthy, accountable public sector. While online public forums are not the place for formal and detailed complaints, the occasional frustrations and contradictions that public service inevitably throws up should be made clear for all to see (it could even make for a good comedy show at times… ). It will lead to a wider appreciation of the daily balancing act public servants encounter, and hopefully lead to greater debate about why such things are that way in the first place. To clamp down on this is to claim that the public service is an infallible dictatorship, whose every word should be adhered to and never questioned. That would be as unhealthy in the UK or Australia as it is in North Korea and Iran (and as we can see from that country, it’s not an approach that has ultimate longevity). 

What do you think – was it right to take down the blog?