Iran: Anomymity of the Internet Fosters Freedom of Expression

Subjects such as religion, sex and Iran’s relationship to the USA are still taboo for the country’s media. In September 2002, for example, the official Iranian news agency INRA caused an uproar by publishing the results of an opinion poll, according to which more than two thirds of all Iranians supported a resumption of talks with the USA. Only the previous day, a leading government representative had delivered a fiery speech against America.

And yet: many Iranian journalists are looking towards the future with optimism. “I think a new path has been opened up”, said the journalist Nasrin Bassiri, “regardless of whether President Chatami and other people in this country want it or not. The tendency towards more openness will continue; the Iranian people have now woken up. This movement has already begun, and it can’t be reversed.”

Women and young people discover the Internet

The Internet has had, and still has, an increasing influence on this development. As early as 1994, several private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) appeared in the slipstream of the state-controlled provider DCI. It is said that in Teheran alone there have been around 1,500 Internet cafés in existence last year. Journalists are not the only people using them to express their opinions without fear of censorship – and to call for reforms.

In the last two years, women and young people especially have started their own websites, such as “Zanan Iran”, and are using personal pages and digital diaries (weblogs) to exchange views, often anonymously.

Control and propaganda

As the Internet’s popularity grew, however, the government took pains to keep it under control. Thus, all private ISPs required a ministerial work permit and were obliged to employ filters on certain websites and e-mail contents, while their users had to declare in writing that they would not visit any “un-Islamic” sites. All websites not under government control by the end of 2001 were closed down. All ISPs were given a list of around 300 websites – mainly news portals – to which access was to be denied.

Certainly, Iran’s government is not so distrustful of the Internet that they don’t want to use it for their own propaganda. In Qom, for example – the Shia clergy’s central educational institute – several thousand students are trained in the use of computers and the Internet every year, so that they can later put this knowledge to use “in the service of Islam and of the nation”.

Lydia Heller, Deutsche Welle, 2003