The Internet and, specifically, social networking has been instrumental in organizing many of the 2009 Iranian election protests.[1] Online sites have been uploading amateur pictures and video, and Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have been places for protesters to gather and exchange information.[1] Twitter has also been used to organize protests.[2][3]
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Twitter in particular has been a key central gathering site during the protests.[4] Twitter hashtags used most frequently in tweets about the protest included #iran, #iranelection, #neda, and #gr88. #neda refers to Neda Agha-Soltan. #gr88 is a contraction of "Green Revolution 1388", 1388 being the Iranian calendar year when the election was held.
The U.S. State Department urged the company to postpone a scheduled network upgrade that would have briefly put the service offline.[5][6] Twitter delayed the network upgrade from midnight American time/morning Iran time to afternoon American time/midnight Iran time "because events in Iran were tied directly to the growing significance of Twitter as an important communication and information network", but at the same time denied that the State Department had "access to our decision making process".[7][8] Aside from the use of social networking sites by protesters to gather and exchange information, individuals around the world used these sites to gain news and information on the events in Iran. Due to strict foreign media censorship by the Iranian government, social networking sites became the primary source of information, videos, and testimonials of the protests. Major news outlets, such as CNN[9] and BBC News,[10] gained much of their information from using and sorting through tweets by Twitter users and videos uploaded to YouTube.[11]. The use of social networking became central enough to the reports from Iran to make Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown state that the way the internet has democratised communication has forever changed the way foreign policy can be carried out[12] and even suggest that web-based social networking could have prevented the Rwandan genocide [13].
While the role of Twitter is considered central to the protests by many, several reports disagree.[14] The Economist magazine stated that the Twitter thread IranElection was so deluged with messages of support from Americans and Britons that it "rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran's government had tried and failed to do". The Economist asserted that the most comprehensive sources of information in English by far were created by bloggers who pulled out useful information from the mass of information, of whom it singles out Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times.[11] A study by social media analytics company Sysomos shows that of 65 million population, there are only 19,235 Twitter users who disclose their location as Iran.[15]
Mousavi's supporters, through social networking sites, exchanged scripts for launching distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) against Ahmadinejad's website.[3][16] British citizens were reported to support the DDoS attacks against president Ahmadinejad by providing software for launching them.[17] Many anti-Ahmedinejad activists have attacked the websites of Ahmedinejad and the government, rendering them inaccessible. The government's official website (ahmedinejad.ir) has at various times been rendered inaccessible.[18]
Anonymous, together with The Pirate Bay, established the Iranian Green Party Support site Anonymous Iran during the protests. The site, which has drawn over 22,000 supporters world wide, provides several tools to circumvent the Iranian regime's Internet censorship; the site thus provides covert resources and support to Iranians who are directly protesting.[19][20] Anonymous has published a short video on Iran and has released a message to the Iranian government, manifestos in which Anonymous declares its reasons for supporting the protests.
In addition to providing support and resources, the site also features a daily report on events in Iran by underground journalist Josh Shahryar called the Green Brief.
Sedazad (from the Persian for Free Voice) is a loose coalition of technically skilled activists.[21] The project began with the establishment of networks of proxy servers and anonymizers in order to enable the protestors and their hacker sympathizers worldwide to freely communicate, and hence organize, with a particular emphasis on open-source solutions.[citation needed] Sedazad's project co-ordinator, Morgan Sennhauser, [22] a college student,[23] currently recommends the Tor anonymity network[24][25] inasmuch as the development and emplacement of Sedazad's own software kit is an ongoing process, some of which is covert.
On July 4th, IT professional Austin Heap announced together with Daniel Colascione their preparations to release Haystack Network, a program designed specifically to bypass Iranian authorities' Internet monitoring and censorship mechanisms and allow the Iranian population to access an unfiltered Internet.[26][27]
The program has since begun to be tested with the help of collaborators from Iran[28] and development continues also for the supporting network of servers and its security policy.[29]
In the meantime, a non-profit organization is also being founded in order to support Haystack efforts in particular and human rights and free speech through technology in general.[29]
The New Hacker Unionist Alliance leader zzmcbtz endorsed the efforts of others attempting to bypass the Iranian internet and claimed that "several members", refusing to provide handles, "previously isolated by enemies of the Free Stream", had contacted members of NHUA. He proceeded to "thank the movement of hackers of all callings to return the Free Stream to Iran". [30]
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