Iranian rebellion grows on the web.

• Author: Flanigen, Bill
• Position: Follow-Up

In the August/September 2004 issue of reason, Marc C. Johnson described online expatriate opposition to the Iranian regime. Spread across the globe and connected by the Internet, Iranian students used chat rooms, anonymous email accounts, proxy servers, and websites to agitate for reform and to communicate with dissenters inside the Islamic Republic. Following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent re-election on June 13,2009, Iranians at home showed the world they were just as capable of using the Net to fight for freedom, tweeting and blogging their discontent by the thousands.

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The microblogging site Twitter, founded in 2006 and therefore young even by Internet standards, has become a forum for protesters who have few other means of safe communication with the outside world and each other. CNN and other news organizations relied heavily on Twitter for information about what was going on inside the closed country as protests against the regime turned into violent clashes between police and protesters.

In 2004 Johnson depicted Iran's expat dissenters as a "fractious electronic vanguard" with organizational troubles. "The only times in recent memory that the expatriate opposition has even gathered around the same table," he wrote, "have been during periods of major crisis for...