Protesters on the streets of Tehran questioning the recent Iranian presidential election results have gotten support from a new breed of election watchers: Internet-enabled anomaly hounds who say the numbers don’t add up.
Social networking services like Facebook and Twitter have played a remarkable role in breaking the Iranian government’s grip on information, both before and after last Friday’s election. But lately, access to the Internet in Iran has slowed to a crawl, demonstrating considerable technical sophistication on the part of Iranian authorities.
As voting protests in Iran devolved into violence, and communications remained sporadic, Internet users in the country are calling for proxies they can use to stay online unmonitored. Twitter, a hub of activity since the rallies began, saw its own protests as users begged the microblogging service to postpone a maintenance period that is scheduled tonight.
As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran–thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities–an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: “CNNFail.”
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