Syria dumps two-timing Facebook over Golan affair

"Men always want to be a woman's first love; women like to be a man's last romance. " -- Oscar Wilde.

Syria. She's a loyal gal. She's a one social-media-forum kind of woman. She's dated around, cautiously: Twitter, Skype, The Tuque Souq. But then she picked her favourite: Facebook. And for awhile, she and Facebook had a good thing going. It wasn't easy; she has a bit of the emotional baggage of Lebanon with a dash of the co-dependent tendencies of Iran. But Facebook grew on her, and she finally accepted that she could be loved.

Then she found out about the affair. Facebook was two-timing her. And with her bitter rival: Israel.

The affair took place in the rolling fertile hills of the Golan Heights, where cool breezes and waterfalls beckon lovers intent on a tryst.

From the beginning of their relationship until just a few weeks ago, Facebook considered the Golan Heights part of Syria; if when you created a Facebook profile your biographical information included the Golan Heights as a place of residence, Facebook would automatically consider your country of residence "Syria."

(For those of you just joining us, Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and has held the region ever since; Syria (like most of the world) considers it Syrian territory and expects it back someday in a hypothetical peace agreement.)

But after a campaign by Israeli settlers in the Golan, Facebook altered its policy and now allows users from the Israeli-occupied region to choose which way they want to swing, whether they want their profiles to proclaim them from Israel or Syria. Facebook wants it both ways.

So Syria says to Facebook: "Just turn around now, you're not welcome anymore." Many Syrians and their sympathetic neighbours have launched a boycott of Facebook* in protest. Will they survive?

* Irony alert: Syria has blocked Facebook access in the past, but Net-savvy Syrians often get around the blockade by going through proxy sites that offer shadow IP addresses to conceal one's country of origin. Now, with Syrians engaging a self-blockading boycott, Syria's government won't lose sleep over how to keep its nationals from logging on and posting pithy status updates.

How to Twitter a Free Iran

As the election protests in Iran enter their second week, authorities are cracking down on real journalists and (ahem) citizen journalists (bloggers, facebookians, twitterese, flikrish) alike who are disseminating the information that allows the clandestine organization of the protests to continue.

Most of you out there in Twitterland have already been told to set your location setting to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3:30 (Iranian time); Iranian authorities are tracking cyberdissent by these and other measures, so as the theory goes, the more non-Iranians that tweet in Iranian disguise, the fewer actual Iranian agitators the Ayatollah will be able to track down, shut down, and shut up.

From a posting on #iranelections cyberwar guide for beginners,* here are the ways in which you can help free Iran from your own home, office or Starbucks La-Z-Boy:

1. Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag. Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran. If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.
2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.
3. Keep your bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don’t retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.
4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all become ‘Iranians’ it becomes much harder to find them.
5. Don’t blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don’t publicise their name or location on a website. These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don’t signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind.
6. Denial of Service attacks. If you don’t know what you are doing, stay out of this game. Only target those sites the legitimate Iranian bloggers are designating. Be aware that these attacks can have detrimental effects to the network the protesters are relying on. Keep monitoring their traffic to note when you should turn the taps on or off.
7. Do spread the (legitimate) word, it works! When the bloggers asked for twitter maintenance to be postponed using the #nomaintenance tag, it had the desired effect. As long as we spread good information, provide moral support to the protesters, and take our lead from the legitimate bloggers, we can make a constructive contribution.

*The instructions also come with a warning: "Please remember that this is about the future of the Iranian people, while it might be exciting to get caught up in the flow of participating in a new meme, do not lose sight of what this is really about."

In other words, please don't meme and run. The Twitter Revolution needs you!