Going green for the Iranian protesters

Amazing, scary and exciting things are going on in Iran: hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets to protest at what they claim os a rigged election result. The protests didn’t fizzle out, as they so often do, but have acquired a critical mass.

People are becoming openly defiant now: members of the Iranian football team took to the pitch today in a World Cup qualifier wearing green armbands, marking their support for the opposition candidate Mir Husein Mousavi. A video on the news today showed a few men at a tube station start chanting; soon the entire platform was shouting opposition slogans. Demonstrations have spread beyond Tehran, the capital, and a network of activists is spreading news and images of the huge, and sometimes violent, demonstrations through Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs and Twitter.

Meanwhile, it’s claimed that web access is being restricted, and the phone network is being shut off at times, while there are reports of universities being raided, and activists disappearing. Reporters are being banned from certain gatherings.

A vote recount is allegedly on its way; there’s a risk that a big, vicious crackdown isn’t too far away either. It takes real guts to hit the streets or continue to blog or upload images when you know there’s a danger it will get you injured, arrested or killed.

If you’re not yet into Twitter you’re almost certainly sick of hearing about it by now, but bear with me: Twitter is functioning as a huge conduit for the Iranian protesters. In the time I’ve been writing this – about 20 minutes – my Twitter search for Iran has gathered an extra 7,230 entries. There’s information about further planned protests, rumours, links to pictures, news stories, blogs, and lots of messages of support.

If you are on Twitter and feel solidarity for the protesters, you could do worse than changing your settings so that you’re registered as living in Iran. This will give intelligence police more accounts to trawl through if they try cracking down on Twitterers. Another really quick thing is going to www.helpiranelection.com, which give your Twitter avatar a fetching green hue. It’s literally the click of a button, and you get one step closer to knowing what you’d look like as a politically aware frog.