After painstakingly hand-counting millions of paper ballots in Iran’s presidential election, a winner was announced minutes after the polls were closed. The terrorist turned president, Ahmadinejad, had been selected by an adoring nation as their leader yet again. Pulease! All illusions of a democratic government have now been erased and the masses are not pleased.
Something interesting has happened this time around though, thanks in large part to twitter. As the Iranian government clamped down on media reporting of the protests in the streets, a cyberwar of sorts has begun in the country using twitter to get news reports out to the world. As their government tries to censor them, users from around the world have come to support the demonstrators by posting links to proxy servers on the web. Many users are also changing their account details to Tehran and changing their timezone to +0330 GMT in an effort to make locating the “tweeters” in Iran akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Other, more aggressive Internet users, are apparently schooling Iran’s government in Internet censorship by launching denial of service attacks on government websites.
You can post your support of those demanding freedom in Iran using the hashtags #iranelection and #gr88.
If you want to take a more active part and create a proxy server for those in Iran to use you can find instructions here: Austin Heap’s Blog.
