When the Iranian Information Ministry combs Twitter, they look for two key factors in user profiles: Time zone and location.  This helps them narrow down who is actually located in Iran and who is not.  By changing your time zone and location to match Iran, you make it harder for those working to find legitimate Iranian Twitter accounts to actually find them.  When these accounts are found, these users can be imprisoned, tortured and even killed for speaking out against the alleged election fraud occurring in their country.  Since Twitter has become a way for protestors to share information, logistics and news with the world, the Iranian government is doing everything in its power to stop this flow of information.

The easiest ways to support Iranians on Twitter is to change your time zone and location.  Go to your Twitter Settings and click on your Account tab.  From there, you can change all the major aspects of your profile, including the time zone and location.  For the time zone, you want to change it to Iran's which is +3:30.  Keep in mind that once you set your time zone to that, all your tweets and account settings will be set to Iran and you will have to adjust accordingly.  You can also change your location to Tehran, Iran or a combination of the two.  Once you have set these, you simply save your settings and exit the menu.

This is not a foolproof method to protect Iranians using Twitter to protest, but it does help slow down the hunt for them.  In this type of protest, it is very important for users to be protected from oppressive governments who care more about self-image than they do freedom of the press.  Since these users are risking their lives to share information with us, there least we can do is help them out by doing the little we can on Twitter to show our support.