As authorities in Tehran have blocked opposition websites, jammed satellite TV channels and banned foreign journalists from covering demonstrations against last week's disputed elections, Iranians living in the U.S. have rushed to fill the communications gap.
Iranian students and exiles here are flooding Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and their e-mail distribution lists with footage of bloodied protesters and other snippets gleaned from friends and relatives back home. And they are serving as conduits for information among supporters of Iran's presidential challenger, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who cannot reach each other through text messaging.
An Iranian engineering student at USC described how her friends in Iran were struggling to confirm if and when a massive march to Tehran's Freedom Square would take place Monday. They couldn't access websites sympathetic to Mousavi, but the students here could. So she relayed the details of the march to everyone she knew through e-mail -- and if that didn't work, called their land lines.
"We don't want to just sit down and watch everything that is happening in Iran," said the 23-year-old, who did not want her name published for safety reasons. "Whatever we find out, we tell them."
On Wednesday night, hundreds of expatriates in the L.A. area, home to one of the largest Iranian American communities in the U.S., gathered at major intersections in Westwood and Irvine to protest the violent crackdown on protesters challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection as fraud. In San Diego, about 200 people demonstrated downtown.
Saadat, 23, who immigrated as a child, brought a camera to Irvine to collect video to post on her Facebook page to show protesters at home that they have support. In the last few days, she said, she has posted articles she has gathered on the unfolding events, at the request of friends and family in Iran. She described these efforts as an attempt to create a new "grass-roots media."
Wednesday's demonstrations were the latest in a string of local protests, which have brought together a cross-section of the expat community, not all of whom seemed comfortable sharing a platform. There were young students wearing opposition green, many of them with their faces covered and holding up posters demanding: "Where is my vote?" And there were aging supporters of Iran's deposed shah, flying the pre-Islamic Revolution Iranian flag, who had not wanted their fellow demonstrators to vote in an election they regard as a sham.
