Iranian Protesters Mobilize on Social Media Web Sites

MARGARET WARNER:

And as we just heard in that ITN report, Facebook and Twitter have become key means of communication among Iranians.

A quick primer on Twitter: It's a free social networking and micro-blogging Internet service. Users can send and read each others' 140-character-long updates known as tweets. Non-subscribers can read the tweets, too.

Over the weekend, the State Department asked the Twitter company to delay planned upgrades to the system to make sure Iranians had access to it during their daylight hours.

For more on the role that all this new media and communication technology is playing in the post-election turmoil in Iran, we go to Reza Aslan, an assistant professor at the University of California-Riverside and the author most recently of "How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror." He is also a columnist for thedailybeast.com.

And Robert Faris, research director at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, he's currently working on a global study with the OpenNet Initiative of Internet-censoring practices in 35 countries.

Welcome, gentlemen, to you both.

Reza Aslan, how essential are these new methods of communication and reporting to what we're seeing unfolding in Iran?

REZA ASLAN, author:

Well, I think the truth is that there are two revolutions taking place in Iran right now. There's the one on the streets — that's obvious — but there's also a revolution taking place in cyberspace.

I mean, never before have we seen the Internet used in this way to essentially put together and coordinate an entire uprising taking place in a country and this, by the way, despite the fact that the Iranian government has some very sophisticated filtering technologies.

They've blocked access to Facebook. They've blocked access to Twitter. But what they haven't relied upon is how much more sophisticated on the Internet the youth culture in Iran is.

So thanks to various proxy servers that are redirecting posts, the fact that digital addresses are being exchanged faster than the government can actually keep up, and now, in a really interesting twist, we have some of these net-free activists in the United States who are not only sending Iranians information about how to bypass these various filters that the government has put up, but who are actually now hacking into Iran's own servers and trying to make the Iranian government actually have a harder time blocking the access that these kids have.