The US State Department confirmed that it intervened to keep Twitter going and downtime was recheduled to take place in the middle of the night in Iran, not in the US. The #IranElection hastag has been trending for days. See:
I saw this, and thought – wow. This is big big news on Twitter. Right now the number 2 trend is #haveyouever and it’s way below #IranElection. Gordon Brown, who was trending the other week can barely be seen. #followfriday, which once a week generates a load of spam is still below #IranElection. The #unfollowdiddy trend was really shortlived. People really care about this, if you search for Twitterers in Tehran, well you’ll find a whole lot more than you did last week. In order to confuse censors, people are changing their timezone and greening their picture in a show of support.
Then, I graphed this…
Well I guess we all have our priorities. Democracy – and people – may be dying in Iran… but at least we have the latest iPhone. The iPhone’s trend has this really sharp peak, but also is quite broad. It might not be number 1 right now, but the US is asleep. I really wouldn’t be surprised if that changed later today.