Word: iranian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does. On June 13, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren't having it, both in English and in Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, Twitter was delivering...
...Khamenei likes to project the image of a magnanimous grandfather, selflessly staying above the fray to guide the country in a virtuous direction ... in reality he is notoriously thin-skinned. Criticism of the Leader is one of the few remaining redlines in Iranian politics, almost a guarantee of a prison sentence." - Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a March 2008 report...
...unusual sort of dictator. He has a down-to-earth image and calm demeanor that sit uneasily with the praise he often heaps upon Iran's militants. His austere lifestyle stands in jarring contrast to the corruption and ostentatious wealth of many other Iranian leaders." - On Khamenei's disposition. (Washington Post...
...Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded Twitter in 2006, they were probably worried about things like making money and protecting people's privacy and drunk college kids breaking up with one another in 140 characters or less. What they weren't worried about was being suppressed by the Iranian government. But in the networked, surreally flattened world of social media, those things aren't as far apart as they used to be - and what began as a toy for online flirtation is suddenly being put to much more serious uses. After the election in Iran, cries of protest from...
...there are counter-countermeasures to this kind of censorship. Sympathetic observers outside Iran have set up "proxies," servers that relay Twitter content into Iran through network addresses that haven't been blocked yet. When the Iranian authorities discover such a proxy, they block it too. It's an arms race crossed with whack-a-mole. Protesters are also organizing denial-of-service attacks against government websites - coordinated efforts to shut down their servers by flooding them with traffic...