The failure of media manipulation in Iran

Washington Times:

The spirit of liberty finally arrived at Tehran's Freedom Square. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrated Monday against Friday's election, which handed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an improbably lopsided victory.

The mass protests followed a weekend of street demonstrations, rioting and other expressions of discontent. These events were brought to the world in real time through social-media networks and online video.

Tehran's authoritarian leaders clearly were caught off-guard. They had managed to take down the telephone system opposition supporters used for texting but for some reason were slow to eliminate other social media. As open defiance of the election results broke out, citizen journalists used new media to spread the word. And the whole Web was watching.

Iran is a highly computer-literate society with a large number of bloggers and hackers. The hackers in particular were active in helping keep channels open as the regime blocked them, and they spread the word about functioning proxy portals. Hackers also reportedly took down Mr. Ahmadinejad's Web site in an act of cyberdisobedience.

The immediacy of the reports was gripping. Well-developed Twitter lists showed a constant stream of situation updates and links to photos and videos, all of which painted a portrait of the developing turmoil. Digital photos and videos proliferated and were picked up and reported in countless external sources safe from the regime's Net crackdown. Eventually the regime started taking down these sources, and the e-dissidents shifted to e-mail. The only way to completely block the flow of Internet information would have been to take the entire country offline, a move the regime apparently has resisted thus far.

There seems to be no shortage of video cameras in Iran....

...
The Mullahs have lost control of the message and the people. Only brutal repression has a chance of putting the people back in the box of total repression by the religious bigots in charge. We should be supporting the people and not the ayatollahs. Obama is still struggling with that message. Barring the media from the streets is not going to suppress the news this time.

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