Needed: Better Tools and Data for Understanding Social Media's Role in #IranElection

I just finished a very interesting PdF Network call with Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, talking about the role of social media in the aftermath of the Iranian election, and Jim Gilliam of WhiteHouse2 and act.ly asked a really good question that deserves repeating and amplification. "What tools would be useful to you," he said to Katrin, "to help you with this work" of sifting and analyzing all the raw data coming out of Iran.

Katrin, who has been in the thick of the #Iranelection media mix with her extensive retweeting of messages coming from inside Iran (the Web Ecology report on Twitter [.pdf link] in Iran ranks her as the 8th most prolific tweeter posting updates about the election), spoke to her most immediate need: better tools to track and analyze the trusted social network of those sources inside Iran that she had determined from careful observation to be credible information resources. "Who are they most linking to? Who are they most following?" she wants to know, and her ideal tool would enable her to do this in real-time. We aren't fully cognizant of how important a person's trust social network may be in supporting their efforts to move information outside of the government's control, she added.

Katrin also mentioned needing better ways to authenticate the raw information coming out of Iran. For example, with hundreds of people reposting YouTube videos from Iran (here's Mashable's seminal top 10), it has become difficult to accurately judge the origination date of a video. Such information could be embedded as metadata in the video stream, the same way digital cameras include encoding on photographs listing such things as device make and model, and date and time of capture--but we need to be really careful not to create tracking information that would expose individual users. (If anyone knows anything further about how one might include metadata on videos, we're all ears.)

I'd add a slightly different request to the list: more data from the big internet platforms on how Iranians and Farsi speakers in and outside the country are creating and consuming social media. YouTube, for example, enables every publisher of a video to discover all kinds of interesting metrics about a video's viewership; surely the company could give us some metadata about how often its top-viewed Iran videos have been viewed inside Iran. Same with Google and Facebook, each of which rushed Farsi-language tools on line at the height of last month's protests. Surely they could tell us how much these tools are being used, and again to what degree by people inside the country.

Of course, this should only be done in a way that protects individual users privacy. But the point is to be able to quantify attention, and help us figure out to what degree social media is, or isn't, altering global and local awareness of what is going on inside Iran. After all, the real distribution of attention--and our ability to shift public attention--is what social media promises and what top-down, capital intensive media currently dominates.

As Katrin cogently argued on the call, the "Twitter revolution" of Iran has been completely overhyped, especially when you consider that perhaps only as many as 8,000 Iranians were native Twitter users prior to the election, and that in her reading, less than two dozen twitterers from inside the country were genuine and credible primary sources of information. When you compare that to the sizable Iranian blogosphere (40,000-100,000 active blogs), it's hardly obvious that Twitter is the most important tool for Iranians involved in sharing information about their country's future.

We need these kinds of tools and data not only so we can better follow what is taking place in and around Iran, but for each and every coming conflict between information controllers and information liberators to come, worldwide. Of all the platforms covered in this post, Twitter is the most open about its data and thus we've seen a huge flowering of useful and not so useful products built on top of its API. By contrast, YouTube and Facebook are still much more closed. I bet we'd see a lot more curation of content from both of those sites if they made it easier to search and analyze their usage.