Via TVNewser comes this video of President George W. Bush's former deputy national security adviser, Mark Pfeifle, offering his opinion on matters pertaining to the aftermath of the Iranian election. In general, Pfeifle gives a great overview and seems generally to support the notion that the administration needs to avoid having "the U.S. or the West become the talking point for the Iranian regime, saying they are trying to do a coup." But his next point was, to my mind, a stretch:
PFEIFLE: If there's anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next time around, it should be the founders of Twitter. who delayed their tuning up of their system in order for an amazing amount of tweets to be sent out in the last week or so.
[WATCH]
Remember when I said that it was possible to both oversell and underplay the importance of Twitter to this story? Well, this is really breaking new ground in the direction of overselling! A Nobel Peace Prize? For delaying a scheduled maintenance to keep the information flowing? I'm trying to imagine how that commemorative statue looks on the National Mall and I'm just not seeing it. And let's remember that delaying that maintenance -- you know, for FREEDOM! -- wasn't even Twitter's idea! It was requested by the U.S. State Department. And as Eat The Press founder Rachel Sklar reminds:
Here's the thing: I couldn't believe the State Department had to step in -- it was obvious what a critical role Twitter was playing in the process. A friend of mine rather presciently noted on Friday night, during the "Facebook land grab," that "Twitter and Facebook are so central and outages are potentially so disruptive that some sort of regulatory scheme can't be far." Turns out we're pretty much there. But even so: if it was so obvious to everyone what a critical role Twitter was playing here -- even the State department -- why wasn't it obvious to Twitter?
Anyway, maybe those Nobel Peace Prizes should go to the people who are, you know, risking their lives, or something.
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