I recently made a post titled “Is Twitter taking sides in Iran Election Protests” and i got a good response from our audience, who all suggested that Twitter is only doing it to get new users and hence some extra bucks. However, i have to slightly disagree with their proposition. The Twitter team is well aware of the fact that few extra customers may leave them facing total ban in the whole country so i do not think that economic factors faced their decision to take sides in Iran anti government protests.
After Twitter, Facebook and Google have also joined the race to expedite their new offering for the Iranian people. According to a blog post by Mashable on the new Facebook offering targeted to Iranian audience;
We know that Twitter took extraordinary measures to keep Twitter running during peak hours in Iran, but now Facebook is taking major steps to facilitate social communication in Iran. Today, Facebook released an early version of Facebook in the Persian language. And from what we have learned, it’s due to the #IranElection crisis.
The Persian translation is already live on Facebook, but the company warns that it’s a test version. In other words, the company and its 400+ volunteer translators have not completed all the steps to assure that all translations are correct, so the text or language may be awkward in places
Facebook released an early version of their offering with attached notes. Moving ahead, lets see how Google thought to help the Anti-Government protests in Iran, mostly known as #iranelection in cyberworld.
The story of Google is not different from Facebook. It also released an early version of its Google Translate service for Farsi to English translation. The service is primarily meant to help people who are foreigners to translate the Iranian language i.e Persian to English. According to TechCrunch story on the new Google offering of Persian to English translation
Google has also added Persion (Farsi) to Google Translate, making it easy to translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian. Google, like Facebook, says that the launch of the Persian translation was primarily due to the events taking place in Iran. And like Facebook, Google warns that the translation isn’t perfect. Google also invites people to click on the “contribute a better translation” link if they find a poor translation.
The application do not have much use for Iranian people since they understand both languages ver well and hence will rarely use it. It might also help people from outside world to post tweets in Persian pretending to be Iranian people. The case of such spammers whose Twitter account only emerged after #Iranelections and who are not Iranians is covered in detail in a blog post here.
I wonder if Twitter, Facebook and Google will have enough reasons to justify these early release of their offerings to help the anti-government protests in Iran? Do you think that these acts have resulted in losing neutrality by the above mentioned companies in the current crises?
Give us your opinion.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
There is no obligation to remain neutral in every case.
When there is a clear choice between right and wrong, neutrality itself becomes wrong.
So, yes, I think they can justify their actions.
@Yigal! The right for one person might be wrong for the other! So its a very vague term when it comes to clash of ideologies.
In case you mean the result of the elections, even US intelligence believes that Ahmedinejad had a margin over Mosavi as said in the NYTimes article by David Ignatius on June 16, 2009. I will share few of the lines for the reference of our readers
U.S. intelligence officials tell me that it’s quite possible that Ahmadinejad actually did win Friday’s election — though with a lower total than the 63 percent that the regime is claiming. “It would appear that the results are inflated,” said one official, reflecting what he said was the preliminary judgment of the intelligence community. But he cautioned: “Our ability to peer into the Iranian election machinery is very limited.”
Link
Freedom requires the free exchange of information. I am proud of the Iranian people for choosing freedom over extremism, and all of us that believe in freedom should support them. If the Iranian government had nothing to hide, then why would they attempt to block communications?
Revolution is Beautiful!
The people of Iran have decided in the election which path they wanted to take and i think we should avoid meddling in the internal affairs of a country. We can report on the events but taking sides should be decided once we know the reality.
Sitting far away from the real situation and only depending on limited anti government people with access to media outlets bias our judgment.
Ahmedinejad has a vast majority of voters in the rural and far flung areas of Iran with no access to media and Twitter and hence their absence should not be taken as a fact that he do not have support.
Anyways, i agree that Freedom is the basic right of human being and we should strive to let the people have it.
Cheers
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