In case you were hiding under a rock in the past week you may have missed what was happening in Iran. Well the big 24 hour news networks certainly did with most of us oblivious to the situation that was unfolding in Iran after hard line President Ahmed Ahmadinejad was allegedly re-elected in a landslide victory.
This is where social networks came into the fold with Twitter coming alive with real time unfolding news as it was happening on the ground in Iran. It took TV news almost 24 hours before they started reporting on the situation and by then the damage had been done.
Breaking news coming out of Iran was that riot police and government guards were firing on crowds who had gathered for protests against the results. Real time updates from Twitter users posting pictures and video of the violence were trickling out of Iran and world wide outrage ensued.
The Iranian government put steps in place to tightly lock down Western coverage of the ongoing violence but to no avail as reports continued to leak of murders in broad daylight in full view of the public by government operatives.
What the situation in Iran highlighted was the fact that nowadays, news will break faster online and in real time quicker than it will on traditional old forms of media. Gone are the days when we turned to CNN for live news coverage, when you have real people sending correspondance in real time it draws and incredible picture of what is really happening long before images are broadcast back to us on the daily news.
Even a week later there is still continuing coverage on Twitter. Follow the "hash" tags #iran or #IranElection for more information.
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