On the right-hand side of Twitter's homepage, there's this little box that shows the top ten "trending" topics, or tags — those words with the pound sign, old man. Usually, this little box reflects the kind of garbage most people assume has piled up on Twitter — last night's episode of Jon and Kate, say, or "jokes" from Jimmy Fallon.

Not this Sunday. This Sunday, there they were: #iranelection and #cnnFAIL.

I'd like to think I clicked on #iranelection because I'm a savvy news consumer who works in online activism. But in reality, I clicked on it because I realized that for a foreign election to be trendy — well, shit must have hit the fan.

It was at once gross and engrossing: I saw Iranians live-tweeting the locations of tanks and militia, photos of Moussavi supporters taking to the streets, videos of government militia beating citizens. I saw dorm rooms invaded, faces bashed in. I saw non-Iranians live-tweeting the locations of proxy servers in a kind of smuggling operation dealing in unfiltered bandwidth that would have made Pablo Escobar proud.

I also saw the tags #cnnFAIL and #iranelection appear together fairly often. A few clicks and Googles later, and it became obvious to anyone who cared to care that CNN had utterly dropped the ball on covering the election results. (I mean, seriously, when did it become legitimate journalism to report retweet the story shilled by a lunatic like Ahmadinejad as if it were just another press release?)

Now, admittedly, I didn't comb the entire Internet last Sunday afternoon to verify this yellowcake-caliber dropping of the ball, but I did notice that other legitimate news sources — The Wall Street Journal, for one — had essentially begun shelling the Iranian government's propaganda. This despite, you know, smart people calling out the agitprop for what it was; the Iran guru from The Council of Foreign Relations had declared that "The fact that this was a stolen election is not in doubt at all."

I'm pretty sure someone important once said something about evil winning when good people do nothing. It seemed, at least to this (somewhat liberal, somewhat skeptical, but not emotionally so) activist, that the evil in Iran had begun to win because the watchdogs were acting like lapdogs. So I decided it was time to cut off the flow of false information and force them to, you know, report. If Ahmadinejad's propaganda machine stopped functioning, maybe the truth would start to. Twitter can stop and start at the same time.

The link that I repackaged and distributed on Twitter this week was to a tool called PageReboot.com. It does exactly what you'd expect it to do: refresh whatever Web site you want at whatever frequency you set. Sure, the site's intentions center more on winning eBay auctions than, say, affecting the outcome of a democratic election, but democracy's a loose term in Iran.

All people had to do, then, was click my link and leave it open, and the lie-spewing servers of The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) would be slammed 3,600 times an hour.

So anyway, my tweet didn't take long to catch on. (I work in political new media, so the people I interact with online really know how to make some noise.) And it didn't take very long for the IRIB site to start slowing down. So I tweeted about it, and e-mailed a few friends in the new-media world, who retweeted it out of courtesy and (somewhat mischievous) human decency. By sundown, our army of not-quite-hackers had swelled to forty or so, and just like that, the official news site of Iran was gone for a few hours.

A few repackaged tweets later, and the Ayatollah's Web site was gone. So was was Ahmadinejad's.

Let me be clear: This most definitely would have happened without me. All told, I probably only broadcasted directly to about two hundred people. But because Twitter is the most powerful communications tool since the telegraph, my little text messages evolved into seventy-five separate micro-broadcasts that were then — theoretically, at least — exposed to a collective 26,000 followers. Think about it: If only the seventy-five people who cared enough to retweet clicked my IRIB-crashing link, then we're talking about a quarter million hits per hour, or six million page views per day. That's about 50 percent more traffic than HuffPo gets. If we assume that just 1 percent of the 26,000 followers clicked the link, then we're talking about Twitter sending more traffic to Iran's (really crappy) servers than NYTimes.com has to handle every day.

So can we stop looking at Twitter as the mouthpiece for Ashton Kutcher's quotidian bullshit, people? Can we start taking quotidian "bullshit" for what it's worth these days — the rapid-response hive of the truth?

Now CNN and the like have since begun to report the kinds of things my friends and I saw on Sunday. I'm pretty sure this had nothing to do with our little adventure in information warfare, and everything to do with the fact that Ahmadinejad is fucking stupid. By banning transmissions from foreign journalists and blocking most of the Internet, he enabled Twitter and its multi-platform, multi-device telegraphic power to become an information bottleneck for the very people about whom he was spewing lies.

No wonder it took only four days — four long (or, for those of us on the new side of the truth, pretty damned short) days — for the global press to go from legitimizing Ahmadinejad's "victory" to eviscerating him.

Josh Koster is the managing partner of Chong and Koster, a Washington, D.C.-based advertising agency.

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