So far the list of rumours - unsubstantiated as far as I can make out - circling wildly on Twitter includes:
Tanks on the streets
Arabic speakers with Anti Riot police - possibly hezbollah (update: The LA times asserted as fact, then rewrote it seems)
Various Oppostion members "arrested"
Iran's electoral commission had declared the election void (it was a dissident sub set of staff)
The Army announcing it will be "neutral" (unsurprising - they are meant to be on side of "the people")
"Massive use of teargas"
Protestors captured weapons from a military base
"Staggering" numbers of injured flooding into hospitals
That the "real" voting figures are emerging giving Mousavi some 19m votes
Rafsanjani and Qom Masters "are going after Khamenei"
Protestors shot in the streets
Injured protestors turned away from hospitals
students killed and buried without families being notified
Ballot boxes were taken away and burned
(If you have others - or have proof of any of the above let me know)
There are and will be more
Some may be true. Some may be confusion. Many are planted in the hope of inciting more protests and support.... The trick is to tell which is which. I wouldn't trust any such reports without hard evidence.
lA Times confirmed Hezbollah involvement a few hours ago.
Posted by: Bill F | June 14, 2009 at 10:09 PM
Thanks Bill - do you have the link?
Posted by: Richard S | June 14, 2009 at 10:10 PM
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-election15-2009jun15,0,1529351.story
Asserts Hezbollah with riot police
Posted by: Richard S | June 14, 2009 at 10:40 PM
I beg to differ: the LATimes story does not mention Hezbollah or Arab-speaking folks accompanying police.
David in LA.
Posted by: David, Encino | June 15, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Thank you so much for being one of the few sane people in a sea of madness.
twitter is rapidly becoming an effective tool of misinformation and propaganda. Many are taking tweets coming out of Tehran as Gospel totally overlooking the possibility of the people behind those tweets being partisan (which they are) and thus their credibility must be examined.
I was feeling lost in the noise of #iranelection until I came across this blog post. I thank you again.
Posted by: Anas Qtiesh | June 15, 2009 at 11:57 AM
Thanks David - its been rewritten, the first version spoke of hard line Hezbollah milita alongside the riot police.
Posted by: Richard S | June 15, 2009 at 01:16 PM
Shooting of protesters:
http://www.channel4.com/news/article.jsp?id=3213457&time=204017
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAOOlEf68Gc
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html
(last three photos of the above)
Posted by: Mitra | June 16, 2009 at 12:28 AM
Thanks Mitra - but the rumours were two days before the shooting....
Posted by: richard s | June 16, 2009 at 11:24 PM
Thanks for this. I was similarly chasing around some of the rumours, looking at the structure of the TR (re-tweet) behaviour... http://danbri.org/words/2009/06/16/415 esp re the "army are moving into town" rumour.
Given the way Twitter currently works, the sourcing of re-posted claims is hard to trace without a lot of guesswork or manual chasing of references to previous pointers.
The opensource standards-oriented Twitter-ish platform Laconi.ca, I'm told, is building into its platform a notion of "re-post". This seems to offer some promise that RT echoes can be more easily associated with their original source.
From your perspective, are there other primitives than "re-broadcasted" that could/should be attached when one user re-posts a message from another? eg. RT can be read as "I agree", "read this", "I think this too", "this deserves to be read", etc. Is there anything that can be done at a platform level to improve things re the echo-chamber issues?
Posted by: Dan Brickley | June 17, 2009 at 08:28 PM
Thanks David - its been rewritten, the first version spoke of hard line Hezbollah milita alongside the riot police.
http://babedugeso.t35.com
Posted by: pyshnye popka | June 14, 2010 at 05:38 PM
Israel may launch a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities like they did with Iraq, but not a full war.
Iran and other middle east countries have modernized their armies just like Israel has; so I don't think Israel can achieve victory like they did with the 6 day war.
Iran's president is a little wacko if you ask me....just less crazy than Kim Ill; Bush isn't crazy....he was just dropped as a baby.....several times
Posted by: FAP Turbo | June 27, 2010 at 10:58 AM