Twitter Tweet Tweet

Lee Seng Jea | u0606602@nus.edu.sg
theridge
A NUSSU Publication

Twitter is the ultimate kay-poh’s tool. Get instant updates from your friends about what they are doing- what shoes they are wearing, who they are fancying right now, etc. This instant messaging service, which started in as late as March of 2006, has become a massive project with roughly 6 million unique visitors per month. Now, you may want to contest the actual number of users, but suffice to say it’s a substantial amount. But what has Twitter been really used for? A recent survey has shown that 40 percent of Twitter posts are pointless babble. What actually constitutes ‘babble’ is of course debatable, but stuff like ‘I just walked past a tree’ is utterly boh-liao. It is easier to think of Twitter more as ‘online gossip’ than anything else. Twitter sentences are short (limited to 140 characters) but this is hardly a problem for most users today, having been trained in the art of keeping their SMS messages within 160 characters.

One of the more famous examples of Twitter use is Ashton Kutcher’s tweets. With a whopping 3.31 million ‘followers’, he is one of the most followed people on Twitter. Followers get the latest gossip on what he’s doing and what youtube videos he’s watching. Twitter messaging has also evolved to facilitate the reading of tweets. For example, tweets with a ‘#’ followed by a name are channel tweets. They are a way of grouping certain tweets under the same topic (e.g. #iranelection, #welovethenhs). Tweets with a ‘@’ followed by a username is a ‘personal’ message although everyone who follows that Twitter user would still be able to read that message (e.g. @aplusk). These symbols (i.e. @, #) are revolutionary and have helped catapult Twitter into competition with Facebook. This is because Twitter now allows for online searches of tweets, and symbols like these help users search for real time information about virtually anything, including a friend’s life.

However, not all that is in Twitter is dirt. Much like how newspaper classifieds played a part in the cold war, Twitter has also played its part- quite a big role actually- in revolutions, protests and uprisings. Some examples are the recent Iran election, the Russia-Georgia war, and anti-communist protests in Moldova. In some cases, these tweets were the war-cries that had been silenced by the ruling government. In other cases, Twitter was used to conduct large-scale Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

In Iran, many users have used Twitter to counter covert government operations aimed at snuffing out opposition protests. A day after the initial Iranian protests, many websites were banned. However, due to the dependence of key public infrastructure on these technologies, not all services could be shut. This was where Twitter, with the help of proxies, came in. Proxies are third-party websites which relay information from one website to the user- www.agentanon.com being one such website. While you are accessing Twitter.com, the government sees you as accessing agentanon.com. Iranians used Twitter to assemble themselves, by gathering protesters despite Mir Mousavi’s (the opposition) attempts to calm protesters down to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Indeed, Twitter became such an important tool in the protests that the US Department of State requested that Twitter delay the planned upgrade of its servers, which would involve shutting the service down, until the Iranian protests were over.

Over in Moldova, a crowd of 10,000 protesters gathered in the city centre to protest the government leadership. They had used Twitter (as well as Facebook and other real-time messaging services) to co-ordinate their efforts. Although the protests didn’t bring about any revolutionary change in the country, they did exhibit the ability of such services to mobilise large groups of people to a common cause.

Another use (or misuse some might say) of Twitter is to co-ordinate Denial of Service attacks. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when large groups of computers connect to a single server simultaneously, thus jamming the server temporarily. Sounds like greek? In real life, a DDoS would be equivalent to 100,000 people storming into Old Chang Kee to buy Curry’O. Imagine if every one of those people agreed beforehand to talkcock and waste the poor employee’s time. It would then be impossible for genuine customers to buy Curry’O until the DDoS was over. Now on the internet, getting 100,000 computers to co-ordinate an attack is pretty simple. Remember that cute screensaver you downloaded? It probably contains a small piece of software which does that. That was what happened during the war between Russia and Georgia last year. The Internet in Georgia was down after having been DDoSed by Russian hackers. It sounds very Cold-War-ish, but it does happen.

Undeniably, Twitter has become an extremely popular and increasingly powerful tool on the internet. The ability to send and receive tweets in real-time is an advantage in critical moments such as during a protest or war. At the same time, Twitter passes on the latest gossip to users- making rumours spread faster than kay-pohs could ever manage.