Tweets about the Iran Election are coming fast and furious now. Many are retweeting about how people should 1) change their Twitter time zone to Iran time and 2) strip Twitter names off retweets from protesters in Iran, so as to confuse the Iranian government.
These proposals don’t really make much sense. Think about it.
How can changing timezones help? The Iranian government is scanning text, and besides Iranians could change their time to New York City time if they wanted to. I doubt that would confuse anyone, since their tweets are about the protests.
Retweeting an Iran protest tweet without the twitter name of the person in Iran probably won’t help either, as the government can just search text to find original poster. Perhaps changing the text slightly would be a better idea. If this is needed at all. After, many Iran protesters by now have probably have probably carefully hidden who they are. If they provide no info about themselves on their Twitter home page, then it’s difficult to see how the government can determine who they are
You can not assume anyone tweeting about this is who they say they are unless you know and trust them, nor that a site that says it’s doing a DOS on an Iranian government site actually is.
News is getting through, but there’s lots of disinformation now too.
The iranian government has taken down Friendfeed. But not Twitter. Thus, maybe they are using it themselves, as well as scanning it to find dissidents.