*Has Internet activism really influenced the Iranian Elections?
The 2009-2010 Iranian election protests were a series of civil revolts based in Tehran and all over the country that targeted the disputed victory of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who had won nearly 60% of the final votes despite that several violations of the law had been reported. As all three opposition candidates denounced the manipulation of the votes, clashes between the civil population and police broke out in what was to become one of the most violent civil unrests in the area (over 4,000 arrests and reported casualties that range from 36 to 72 deaths). After cybernetic attacks were launched against Ahmadinejad, the government shut down the population’s access to Internet and restarted it later with lower bandwidth. Facebook was being filtered, websites were blocked by the authorities, mobile phone services had stopped and all websites affiliated with the BBC and The Guardian were shut off. Essentially, social networks were instrumental in organising the protests and platforms such as Twitter and Facebook became mediums of collecting and exchanging information between protesters. For scholars and equally for the general opinion, Twitter became a symbol of a new kind of activism that can occur on the Internet. Used as a tool for mobilising and for providing documentation of the happening events, it is a thought-provoking exercise to look even further and see how has Internet activism changed the Iranian election. Could have the Iranians still protest in the same manner without the existence of social networks such as Twitter? How exactly did they make use of Twitter and how did the Internet help them?
As it has been acknowledged by key social theorists (Arendt 1958; Habermas 1989), effective democracies require a strong and functional public sphere. In the current times of socio-political crises, the uses of new media tools as means of communicating political ideas have increased to such an extent that they eventually became part of the citizens’ standard way of protesting. Over the last two decades, the advent of new telecommunication technologies (supported by the standardisation of the Internet) has encouraged civil groups to adopt various tools and information dissemination techniques that aim to enhance their strategic effectiveness for social change. What makes this topic extremely relevant to the contemporary developments of the societies around the globe is that, within an academic setting, there are plenty of studies that discuss the relationship between Internet activism and the politics: social rebellions and the role of information technologies (Allagui and Kuebler 2011), the power of social networks as spheres capable of mediating neutral debates (Maireder and Schlögl 2014), and the unprecedented opportunities for flows of information produced by the emergence of the Internet as an intermediate tool between conflicting sides (Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner 2011). What is more, the revolutionary wave of both non-violent demonstrations and violent protests (often referred to as the Arab Spring) that have commenced in the Arab world during the past five years proves the societal relevance of the juxtaposition between the Internet and activism. Although much has been written on the general connection between online users and their political or civic engagement (Anduiza, Cantijoch, and Gallego 2009; Dahlgren 2009; Hara and Huang 2011), empirical studies of the developments of the 2009 Iranian election are relatively scarce.
In addition to a rather complicated technical expertise that is required in order to receive and collect the data, the certitude of Internet-based research is undermined by a lack of knowledge about the entire ecosystem that provides the data. When one bases their research on web-related studies, it is practically impossible to be sure that all the relevant information is included (or sometimes that the one included is worthy of mention), aspect that makes the entire process relatively inconvenient at times. Ultimately, from a more philosophical perspective, it can be argued that Internet activism has its own limitations and such online activities may merely empower and unite those already active in the offline world but may also wrongly create the impression of activism. Scholars such as Sarah Sobieraj (2010, p.518) could affirm that the general idea of online activism is not enough to create durable repercussions; however, if mixed with the actual physical act of protesting (as it is the case with the Iranian revolution), the Internet can become a remarkably powerful weapon for socio-political or civic movements.
Another problematic aspect of the connection between the political Iranian revolution and the influence of social media platforms is the legitimacy of such claims. Described as the Twitter revolution by the media, the West primarily focused not on the Iranian people and their hardships but on the role of Western technology; although Twitter was important in publicising what happened, its role was definitely overemphasised, scholars argue (Tehrani in Weaver, 2010). As a matter of fact, Hamid Tehrani estimates that less than 1,000 Iranian Twitter users were active at the time of the election. What is more, in order to show their support for the protests, tens of thousands of Twitter users across the globe switched their locations to Tehran in an attempt to confuse Ahmadinejad’s henchmen (Weaver, 2010).
Allagui, I., Kuebler, J. (2011) The Arab Spring and the Role of ICTs, International Journal of
Communication 5, pp. 1435-1442;
Anduiza, E., Cantijoch, M., Gallego, A. (2009) Political Participation and the Internet: A Field Essay,
Information, Communication and Society, 12:860-78;
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago University Press, Chicago;
Dahlgren, P. (2009) Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication and Democracy,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
Gaffney, D. (2010) #iranElection: Quantifying Online Activism, Web Science Conference, April
Habermas, J., (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by T. Burger, MIT Press;
Hara, N. Huang, B. (2011) Online Social Movements, Annual Review of Information Science and
Maireder, A., Schlögl, S. (2014) 24 Hours of an #outcry: The Networked Publics of a Socio-Political
Debate, European Journal of Communication, accepted 14 February, 2014;
Sobieraj, S., (2010) Reporting Conventions: Journalists, Activists and the Thorny Struggle for
Political Visibility, Social Problems, Vol. 57, Issue 4, pp. 505-528
Sparrow, B., Liu, J., Wegner, D. (2011) Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of
Having Information at Our Fingertips, Science 333:776-78
Weaver, M. (2010) “Iran’s Twitter revolution was exaggerated, says editor” Wednesday 9 June, The
Guardian, URL: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/09/iran-twitter-revolution-protests
