Jack Shafer at Slate is doubting Twitter:

Unlike several other technology-friendly journalists, I’ve found it more noise than signal in understanding the Iranian upheaval. I’m not saying that there is no signal to be found; I’m just saying that my cognitive colander isn’t big enough to strain out Iran information I can rely on…. I appreciate, as Atlantic Senior Editor Andrew Sullivan wrote in his blog, that many of the reports are “more about the mood than hard fact.” But my appetite for mood is easily sated while my appetite for hard fact isn’t. If we should be able to criticize Ayatollah Ali Khamenei without fear of being shot, so, too, should we be able to scrutinize Twitter.

Kevin Drum counsels in MotherJones.com that before we get weak-kneed with our paeans to the revolutionary powers of Twitter, we should all remember that genuine and huge protests in Iran predate both Twitter and the Internet.

One of the sharper Twitter critics I’ve read this week is Evgeny Morozov, who, writing in Slate‘s sister site ForeignPolicy.com yesterday, posed the heretical notion that tracking or blocking the tweets and blog postings by in-country Iranian protesters just might not be the regime’s top priority.

Nicholas Thompson in Wired, too:

We have no idea how many Tweets are spreading through RSS, Facebook pages, and text-messages. Nor do we know how info gets into every Twitter feed. But there’s evidence that the reach of some of the most prominent Iranian “Green Revolution” Tweeters may not be as great as it first appears. For example, many of the Iranian tweeters described in the Western press seem to have between 10,000 and 30,000 followers. That’s a lot; but Ashton Kutcher it ain’t. […]

This afternoon, I emailed UCSD professor Babak Rahimi, the author of “Internet & Politics in Post-revolutionary Iran” and someone who is in Tehran right now covering the events. I asked what he thought of my hunch that we in the Western press are over-hyping the impact of Twitter. Here’s what he said:

“I very much agree with you. The Twitter factor is present, but not as significant as, say, cell phone or social networking sites… [granted, it’s hard to separate these out — nms] I just wonder (or worry) how the U.S. media is projecting its own image of Iran into what is going here on the ground.”

And, of course, from the Business section of the NYTimes, Twitter use in Tehran has given the revenue-free Web service a credibility boost. But the company still hasn’t proved it can leverage its popularity to make money.

RELATED — Romenesko:

By criticizing CNN for using social networking sites to report what’s going on in Iran, Jon Stewart “turned himself into a caricature: he fashioned himself as the crotchety Luddite who opposes new media platforms not on their merits, but because they’re new,” says Megan Garber. Stewart’s attack on CNN was “a rare misstep for The Daily Show’s normally trenchant media criticism,” she adds.