With Recent True Stories like the Tehran Crackdown and the False Leads like WND is using and loosing credibility about President Obama's birth certificate, it is important to remember, there is Facts and Fallacies on Twitter.Your Favorite Pastor or Poster, Blogger or New Reporter may be duped or dupe you into sensationalistic claims much like the "Get Rich Quick" Scams or "Click It" make millions scheme's flooding the Internet and Twitter.
But,
In all these things we have more, we have each other and we have God. God who can and will lead us inot all Truth as we seek to follow Him and each other as we warn each other of Scams or phony reports that stay on the Internet Years after they are debunked.
Prove all things, hold fast that whihc is good is absolutely necessary and you will find most sites will not tell you that. They will not say to APPROVE or DISPROVE the posts they have, they will in fact sue you.
They will seek to make themselves out to tbe the authority rather than turn all credibility to God and Honor and glory to the one who made them and forget the dust from whence they came.
We who love are not so, we can warn and still love, we can state facts and not lie, we can use every oppportunity to point to Jesus the Author and Finisher of our Faith and Find THAT IS WHERE THESE SITES AND POSTERS FAIL.
Who do they point to?
Who or what do they use?
What do they gain from saying it?
I, Michael James Stone, will state clearly, and factually that on the Web ALL THINGS, EVERYONE, whether prophet or pastor, preacher or teacher, blogger or News Anchor, ALL and I mean all Fall short of the Glory of God and We all need to be saved from oursleves, from our Sins and from the corruption we can so easily put in another person soul by the words we write and thigns we say.
WE WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE....
God Help us.
Michael.
An image smuggled out of Teheran via the Internet in recent days may well have captured the essence of the struggle which has pitted followers of the reformist camp in Iran against the state authorities.
A photo of a broken computer...
A photo of a broken computer taken by a University of Teheran student and distributed on Twitter.
The image is of a computer owned by a University of Teheran student, which had been smashed to pieces by Iranian police officers during the recent unrest. Shards of glass mark where the computer screen had been.
"We [would] like to show [what] the police did to our dorms and computers [in the] last [few] days," a message on Twitter, the short-message social networking Web site, said, directing readers to the picture.
Yet however many computer screens are destroyed by the truncheons of Iranian security agents, and despite attempts by the regime to block access to sites like Twitter and Facebook, such sweeping measures of repression have failed to plug the enormous leak of information coming out of the Islamic Republic.
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"Telephone report from my wife - They are open[ing] firing on the crowd. The police are refusing entry into the hospitals unless it is the Basij [pro-regime militia]," another message read, this time posted on the Teheran Bureau Web site.
According to the anonymous author, wounded protesters were told by militia members, "You deserve to die." This was one of the last posts to appear on the Teheran Bureau Web site.
Updates from Twitter, however, show no signs of abating.
"We students do not chant death to America, we want the American constitution," another Twitter message from Iran declared to the world.
It is Twitter which has most notably come to play an indispensable role in pumping out this type of information, forming a virtual pipeline connecting Iranian dissidents to one another and to the outside world.
"Twitter is most suited to a psychological information war, and right now in Iran there is a war over information," Dr. Yaniv Levyatan, an expert on information warfare at the Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies of the University of Haifa, told The Jerusalem Post. "This is the first Twitter war."
"On the one hand, you've got Ahmadinejad's regime striving to manipulate and hide information, and to create an information monopoly. But unfortunately for them, this can no longer be done because of the democracy of the new media," Levyatan added.
"We are seeing the regime do everything it can to censor information, but its efforts aren't working because of the phenomenal rate at which updates are appearing," he said. "This is history."
Levyatan described a lightening-paced game of cat and mouse being played by the Iranian regime and its opponents on the Internet. In this game, proxy servers - alternative Internet servers located abroad - are playing a decisive role in helping the protesters sidestep Iranian state Internet filters.
"The main content of messages on Twitter is made up of IP addresses of proxy servers located in the West," Levyatan explained. Once an Iranian protester gets hold of a proxy server, he can use his cell phone to transmit videos and text to the outside world.
"This is also how they coordinate themselves on the streets and pass down instructions," Levyatan said.
"Yesterday, instructions were transmitted on Twitter on how to act during demonstrations. Activists were told not to get violent with the basij, and to demonstrate peacefully. In the cyber world, supporters of the reform camp outside of Iran are being asked to hack Web sites affiliated with the regime," he added.
The Iranian government has, however, also attempted to fight this new war.
Iranian agents have set up false Twitter accounts from which they transmit disinformation to confuse the reformists. False times and locations of fictitious protests are routinely sent out.
"Ahmadinejad's people are disguised as dissidents on Twitter. They will falsely tell demonstrators that a protest has been canceled," Levyatan said.
Iranian intelligence agents identify Web users in Iran by homing in on the local time settings of their computers. If the local time is set to Teheran on one's computer, "Iranian agents will think you're Iranian," Levyatan said.
As a result, Iranian protesters "have asked everyone to change their local time settings to Teheran," to confound such efforts, he said.
"The situation in Iran has proven that today, the kilobyte is more powerful than the megaton. The modem is more significant than a bullet. The modem connects us all to the global village, while the bullet strikes a single person," Levyatan said.
Still, the Twitter revolution has its drawbacks. The sheer quantity of information being transmitted means that quality information can be lost among less useful data.
"This is one of the problems, a flooding of information," Levyatan added.
