Every now and then, a controversial issue triggers a flood of online discourse. For our Noise Filter feature, the WHIR pans the raging rivers of opinion for shining nuggets of useful commentary.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Since the arrival of the hotly disputed results of Iran’s presidential election arrived on Friday – in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed to have defeated reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi – demonstrations, both pro-government and dissenting, and both peaceful and violent, have taken place across the country’s capital of Tehran and elsewhere, with that dissent being echoed online.
Though Ahmadinejad claimed a landslide victory, Mousavi and his supporters contest the results, accusing the government of election fraud. On Saturday, the US government announced its rejection of the results and intention to “see what the Iranian people decide.” This week, the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for an official investigation into election irregularities.
An Associated Press story from Sunday quoted US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, from a news conference with Canada’s foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon.
"We are monitoring the situation as it unfolds in Iran,” said Clinton, “but we, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide."
News site Boston.com has been publishing series of photos from the election and subsequent unrest in its “Big Picture” photojournalism section. This week, it ran a selection of extremely compelling pictures of the protests, including some potentially disturbing and graphic images.
"Supporters of reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, upset at their announced loss and suspicions of voter fraud, took to the streets both peacefully and, in some cases, violently to vent their frustrations. Iranian security forces and hardline volunteer militia members responded with force and arrests, attempting to stamp out the protests - meanwhile, thousands of Iranians who were happy with the election outcome staged their own victory demonstrations."
According to reports, the Iranian government has responded to the unrest in part by restricting the activity of foreign journalists. And since the bulk of Mousavi’s supporters are among the younger, more tech-savvy portion of the population (Mousavi himself ran a campaign that relied in part on social media), social media and citizen journalism – along with other varieties of online reaction – have become one of the key stories to follow the election.
YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter are among the key resources being used by people on the scene to disseminate information about what is currently taking place in Tehran. In an article breaking down the elements of online dissent, PC World’s Ian Paul writes:
"As political tensions increase in Iran, online communities are ramping up their opposition efforts. The Iranian government continues to restrict access to the Web, but many opposition supporters are still able to share news and information online."
On Sunday, Mousavi posted a letter to the Iranian people on photo sharing site Flickr (his photo stream being another regularly-updated source of images from the protests), a translation of which is posted by Fox News here:
“Today,” he says, “I through a letter that I sent to the Guardian Council have requested that the results of this election be void and I see this as the only way to regain public trust and support in their government. My suggestion as your public servant is that you continue your rallies in a peaceful and non confrontational manner.”
In the Monday New York Times Article “Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online,” Brad Stone and Noam Cohen further detail the online activity in support of Mousavi and in defiance of the reported election results.
“On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics.
A couple of Twitter feeds have become virtual media offices for the supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi. One feed, mousavi1388 (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar), is filled with news of protests and exhortations to keep up the fight, in Persian and in English. It has more than 7,000 followers.
Mr. Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook has swelled to over 50,000 members, a significant increase since election day.”
The feeling is that Twitter’s political significance to the circumstances in Iran has become so great that the service’s hosting provider NTT suspended a planned service interruption Monday in order that Twitter would remain available as a tool in the discourse.
“A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight's planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran),” said a post on the official Twitter blog.
In another very significant development, online protesters have, in certain quarters, turned to encouraging Internet users in the US and other locations outside Iran to participate in denial of service attacks against pro-government or state-run media websites in Iran.
A long and very involved Monday post on the Foreign Policy blogs by Evgeny Morozov, entitled “DDOS attacks on Iran's web-sites: what a stupid idea!” assembles a ton of links to resources and information on the subject, and questions the logic behind what he seems to consider a particularly misguided form of dissent:
“It's a shame that some American bloggers are participating in this campaign and are even encouraging others to take up their "cyber-arms". Not only is this irresponsible and probably illegal, it also hurts users in Iran and gives their hard-line government another reason to suspect "foreign intervention" - albeit via computer networks - into Iranian politics.”
At this point it’s impossible to compile something truly representing the breadth of information online about the protests, particularly with new information being distributed constantly, but many of the resources linked to in this article (and resources linked to within those links) are posting updates on an ongoing basis.
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