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Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Twitter was scheduled to go down for scheduled maintenance today, but it was postponed at the request of the State Department:
Confirmation that the U.S. government had contacted Twitter came as the Obama administration sought to avoid suggestions it was meddling in Iran's internal affairs as the Islamic Republic battled to control deadly street protests over the election result.
....Twitter Inc said in a blog post it delayed a planned upgrade because of its role as an "important communication tool in Iran." The hour-long maintenance was put back to 5 p.m. EDT/2100 GMT, which corresponds to 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday in Iran.
Fascinating. The original upgrade schedule would have cut service in the middle of the day in Tehran.
Via Sullivan, of course.
It WAS down
Well that's odd because it definitely DID go down for maintenance today. I was working on something and needed to get a Twitter URL for a page I was building, and it was down. Don't know the exact time, but mid-afternoon EDT anyway. Kinda surprised me--who takes down a major site for maintenance midday on a weekday? Four a.m. Sunday is more like it. But they were definitely down.
What they did was move the
What they did was move the scheduled downtime from late last night to this afternoon. The previously scheduled downtime would have been in the middle of the day for Iran because of the time zone differences.
So in a way the downtime was still in the middle of the night, but for the Iranians not Americans.
Way to show solidarity there
Way to show solidarity there with people fighting for democracy....
Not sure State was the factor
As soon as the yellow strip announcing the outage was posted on the top of everyone's home page, people who had been following #iranelection immediately started hash-tagging #nomaintenance, pointing out to Twitter that their middle-of-the-US-night maintenance would fall right in the middle of the Iranian day. #nomaintenance quickly rose to the number two 'topic' (#iranelection was - and is - number one).
Twitter quickly put up a disclaimer that it wasn't their call but that of their hosting provider. So people started tweeting the email and phone number of the hosting provider; soon the host company had created twitter accounts to come online and report to #iranelection and #nomaintenance that they were taking it up with their management, and shortly thereafter, they reported the reschedule to the middle of the IRANIAN night.
It was pretty incredible to watch unfold.
Liberals castigated
Liberals castigated conservatives who wanted Obama to speak out in support of the demonstrations. Liberals, look down their noses, explained patiently that supporting the demonstrators might make it look like the U.S. is orchestrating the demonstrations (Maddow's explanation; how she equates support with orchestration is beyond me) and allow the mullahs to use it as an excuse to crack down on the demonstrators while blaming big bad America.
Now, you have the U.S. State Department asking a private U.S. company to stay up and allow the website to be used by demonstrators getting their side of the story out to the world. This is the right thing to do, but isn't this the support from the government that liberals like Maddow warned us about yesterday? This goes beyond simple support, this is actually doing something. Yet, the liberals don't think this might upset the mullahs.
Interesting.
Americans should conclude
Americans should conclude Twitter has been commandeered for use by state security.
rewind
From the NYT article on this, I think it's clear that the 'State Department contact' was a twenty-something Twitter user who was one of the hundreds (thousands?) who called Twitter's hosting provider to ask that the maintenance be rescheduled.