Additional information is coming in about the reason behind Twitter’s delay in taking its site offline to perform critical maintenance, as I reported in a post earlier today.
Photo courtesy of Twitter
The U.S. State Department urged the social networking site this weekend to postpone its service to accommodate Iranians in the midst of sometimes bloody protests over the recent presidential election, Reuters reported minutes ago.
Users in Iran had been using social media sites like Twitter to communicate, share news and multimedia content and coordinate protests in relatively large numbers since the elections.
The hour-long maintenance had been pushed back from Monday night in the United States to 5 p.m. EDT Tuesday, or 1:30 a.m. Wednesday in Iran.
“We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,” a State Department official with knowledge of the conversation the department had with Twitter officials told Reuters.
It was an unexpected admission from the United States as any sign of U.S. involvement with Iranian affairs – including through Web sites like Twitter – could be used as evidence that the U.S. is interfering in the Iranian electoral process.
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told Reuters that conversations with Twitter could not be considered interfering.
“This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media,” Reuters reported Kelly as saying.
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