On Tuesday, the US State Department asked Twitter to delay its scheduled site maintenance to keep the flow of information from Teheran uninterrupted. Though the micro-blogging site did not comment on such a request from the US government, it did tell its users that Twitter had been playing an important communication tool in Iran and that since sharing news from Teheran was too important to interrupt, the site had decided to delay the down-time.
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly confirmed during a media interaction on June 16 that the administration had been monitoring networking sites like Twitter to gain information about what is going on in Iran.
'This is about the Iranian people. This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard is through new media,' he said.
The Washington Post, quoting an Iranian-American activist in Washington, said tweets from a handful of students have been instrumental in getting information to people outside Iran.
The information is coming from Twitter since foreign reporters's movements has been limited, she said.
People have been posting messages like 'Riot police baton protestors', 'Support the Iran cause' and 'Stay United', and battle cries to spread the word about clashes between defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's supporters and the police and hardline supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
US President Barack Obama has been critical of Iran's attempts to block the flow of updates to the outside world. In a statement on Tuesday, he said: 'It is for the Iranian people to decide about their future. This is not about us. This is about Iran. Having said that, of course, I think it is very -- or we think as a government that it is very important that the universal right of people to express themselves peacefully, that this right has to be respected. And of course, we condemn any acts of violence that led to the deaths of these demonstrators.'
