Blogosphere defiant in support of Mousavi

SUPPORTERS of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi posted defiant messages on Twitter yesterday, calling for a second banned pro-Mousavi rally to go ahead and offering security updates.

Websites such as Twitter and Facebook have become a focal point for young, urban Iranians opposed to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who defeated Mousavi in last Friday’s presidential election and whose government controls the state media.

“Alert: Mousavi march still on. 5pm,” read one short message, or “tweet”, on Twitter.

“Good luck at the march. Don’t take cars, they will be waiting for you when you return to them,” read another, as tweets on the subject of the Iranian election poured onto the site every few seconds.

The Iranian government blocked SMS text messages during polling after opposition candidates used them to galvanise key young voters during the fiercely contested election campaign, and Tehran residents were still unable to send texts yesterday.

The BBC’s Persian service was also blocked.

Social networking site Facebook, which has about 150,000 members in Iran, said that it had reports that some users in Iran were having difficulties accessing the site.

“This is disappointing, especially at a time when citizens are turning to the internet as a source of information about the recent election,” it said in a statement.

Unrest has rocked Tehran and other cities since the Interior Ministry released results on Saturday that showed hard-liner Ahmadinejad had defeated Mousavi by a landslide.

According to internet censorship monitor OpenNet Initiative, Iranians went online in droves during the 1997-2005 presidency of Mohammad Khatami, when dozens of independent publications were shut down and journalists jailed.

In a 2007 report on Iran, the OpenNet Initiative estimated there were about 400,000 blogs in Farsi, as publishing on the internet exploded, despite what it called “one of the most extensive technical filtering systems in the world”.

More than 23 million Iranians in a country of 70 million – more than 60% of whom are under the age of 20 – have access to the internet.

Facebook was shut off in Iran on May 23, joining political and human-rights websites which had already been blocked.

The ban was lifted on May 26, following strong criticism from moderate candidates.

Mousavi has almost 48,000 supporters on his main Facebook page. Ahmadinejad also has a page with 2,615 fans, while the “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!” group has more than 57,000 members.

Meanwhile, social networking service Twitter delayed a planned upgrade to avoid cutting daytime service to Iranians who have been using it to co-ordinate protests.

Twitter said in a blog post on its site a network upgrade had been planned for Monday night in the United States, which would have cut daytime service in Iran yesterday.

“Our network partners at NTT America recognise the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran,” the blog post said. NTT America is a subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation of Japan.

The hour-long maintenance was due to take place at 1.30am this morning in Iran instead.