Ahmadinejad's Fear of the Internet

Iran's rulers are afraid of the Net because it's being used to organize resistance. Western media also rely on it to get news out of the country

By Christian Stöcker, Carolin Neumann and Thorsten Dörting

Even before the protests over Iran's disputed presidential election began, it was clear that the Iranian regime feared the power of the Internet. But now an open war has broken out between the government and its security forces on the one side and protesting Web users on the other. Web sites are being blocked and Internet access in general seems to be more difficult—or even paralyzed.

On Wednesday, a senior spokesman for Iran's military issued an open threat against bloggers and Web site operators in the country: Content which could "create tension" must be removed immediately, otherwise there would be legal consequences.

Iran's rulers are afraid of the Internet partly because it is one of the main tools being used to organize mass protests and also because it undermines—at least partially—the current heavy restrictions on the international media in the country.

Within just a few days, a totally new symbiosis of "old" media and explicitly partisan "citizen journalists" has emerged. Given the crackdown on the international media, there is no other way to get the news out of the country: Western journalists who are still in the country are being threatened and are not allowed to leave their offices or to report from the streets of Tehran. Some are even being expelled from the country, like Spiegel Online correspondent Ulrike Putz, who had to leave Iran on Monday.

But it's evidently proving harder to quell the information flow out of the country on Internet sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa, to name just a few sites being used by protesters. The micro-blogging site Twitter, which allows users to send messages of up to 140 characters and which has special feeds such as "#IranElection" devoted to the issue, remains an important tool, despite growing fears of infiltration by the Iranian secret service. It is hard to effectively block access to the platform, as it can be accessed through various different applications, including ones that run on mobile phones, as well as via the Twitter.com Web site. The service is a labyrinth with many entrances and exits.

The Global YouTube News Bureau

Meanwhile the video-sharing platform YouTube has declared itself to be a mouthpiece for the protest movement. An entry on the official YouTube blog shows clear sympathy for the protesters and links to a YouTube channel dedicated to protesters' videos. "In essence, YouTube has become a citizen-fueled news bureau of video reports filed straight from the streets of Tehran, unfiltered," writes the YouTube blogger.

Admittedly this is excellent PR for the Google (GOOG)-owned platform, but it is also true. The same applies to many other platforms on which images, texts or drawings can be published. The situation in Iran is such that the supporters of the two main camps can be clearly distinguished through their appearance alone. Supporters of the defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi tend to wear Western clothes and also stand out through their green protest flags, armbands or headbands, green being Mousavi's symbolic color. They can hardly be mistaken for member of the militias loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who often have beards and don traditional dress.

So far there has been very little discussion about the authenticity of the images, like that which took place in connection with the riots in Tibet in early 2008. Nevertheless, the photos and videos from Iranian demonstrators' mobile phone cameras exhibit familiar problems: It is sometimes difficult to see where the footage was shot and what exactly is going on.

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