Blogger Controversy about Iranian Twittering

Jerusalem Post

Charting Stocks

JTA

An anonymous blogger says he investigated whether Israelis are engaged in a Twitter attack intended to cause political instability in Iran. In a highly controversial posting (challenged by a Jerusalem Post article), the blogger writes:

"Were these legitimate Iranian people or the works of a propaganda machine? I became curious and decided to investigate the origins of the information. In doing so, I narrowed it down to a handful of people who have accounted for 30,000 Iran related tweets in the past few days. Each of them had some striking similarities -

1. They each created their twitter accounts on Saturday June 13th. 2. Each had extremely high number of Tweets since creating their profiles. 3. “IranElection” was each of their most popular keyword 4. With some very small exceptions, each were posting in ENGLISH. 5. Half of them had the exact same profile photo 6. Each had thousands of followers, with only a few friends. Most of their friends were EACH OTHER. Full story - Charting Stocks

A report on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency website also discusses this controversy --

"The State Department staffer who asked Twitter not to shut down for maintenance earlier this week so that Iranians could keep communicating with the world is a 27-year-old Jewish Stanford University graduate who is the youngest member of the State Department policy planning staff, reports the New York Times." Full story - JTA

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Background information on Israeli connections to Iran can be found here.