Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World

1. Mongols and Mullahs

25 Mongols and Mullahs ​ 1Neda Agha-Soltan wanted freedom for everyone. Neda was not alone. Many joined her in the street protests following the disputed Iranian presidential elections. The vote on June 12, 2009, became a referendum on the country’s controversial sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Decades after a popular uprising that swept the shah of Iran from power in 1979, the people still fretted over the future course of the Islamic Revolution—a choice between integration with the West versus an extremist vision of religious zealotry and a return to ancient Persian glory. For Ahmadinejad the notion of any accommodation was anathema. Choosing him meant choosing the hardest of the hardliners. The government chose to leave nothing to chance. Claims of irregularities emerged even before the vote, including reports that the regime had distributed 400,000 tons of free potatoes to poor people, an apparent effort to bribe voters. This prompted campaign chants: “Death to potatoes!”1 The opposition only intensified when Ahmadinejad claimed victory only hours after the polls closed. Large street demonstrations escalated in the days following. Still, when Neda took to the streets on June 20, she was far from afraid. She had been to protests before. They seemed more like a carnival than a clash. The young woman dressed casually—sneakers, jeans, a short-sleeve black top, and a kerchief covering her dark hair. On this day, thousands flooded the avenues of Tehran, stranding her cramped Peugeot 206 in a snarl of traffic. Sweltering heat prompted her and two friends to abandon the car. They walked a short way to get a closer look. They sauntered. The crowd seemed peaceful enough. Until Neda Agha-Soltan was shot square in the chest. 26 Chapter 1 She bled—and died—on the street. Most of the verifiable “facts” surrounding her death come from the usual sources expected from a scene of chaotic protests and government censorship . These included a handful of media reports offering details, such as the BBC Persian service interview with Caspian (Kaspeen) Makan, described as her fiancé. She had never meant to be a martyr, Makan asserted. “She was not politically affiliated with either side of the current struggle,” he added, “Neda wanted freedom, freedom for everyone.”2 Makan contended that she was principally a bystander to history rather than an activist herself. That was his story. But such reporting was not how most of the world found out about Neda or how they interpreted how she died. Traditional media were late to the game in turning her death into a global event and a symbol for the Iranian opposition movement. Youtube Martyr From a media perspective it might have seemed like the shooting would be an ideal story. Writing on election violence, Robert Meadow argues, “Suffice it to say that the old adage ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ underscores the premium news media—and especially electronic media—place on vivid violence .”3 He may well be right. But, on June 20, there was no journalist present at the shooting. Hence there was no news. The day after the shooting, a Google news search elicited no returns for keyword “Iran” matched with keyword “Neda.”4 The fact that the Google search engine did not recognize a relationship between the two reflected the lack of mainstream reporting on the incident. Nevertheless, the death of Neda still went global. That’s because something else was drawing attention online. Bystanders had captured her collapsing and dying on cell phone cameras. The files were uploaded to the Internet, becoming little less than the video shot heard round the world. Twitter (a social networking site where users can exchange messages of 140 characters or less) offers one means to track the influence of the images. Exchanges about Neda Agha-Soltan became one of the “trending topics” by the end of the day.5 The process by which this occurred offers an example of the capacity of social networking tools to focus a crowd. Tweets (postings on Twitter) used the # symbol (called a “hashtag”) before the word “neda” to mark the subject as one they were interested in following. Hashtags are user-generated coding for searchable terms, a feature that was first adopted by some Twitter users employing protocols that had been developed for Internet Rely Chat (IRC), a form of Internet text messaging used between specific groups or “channels” exchanging communications on line. Mongols and Mullahs 27...