Social media beats censorship in Iran? Wow, that's special, eh?
In an Instagram post that same day, [Iranian telecom minister] Jahromi admitted that "we are now in a situation where our sovereign state and other nations of the world do not have the ability to regulate international social networks." Some 25 percent of Iranians use virtual private networks, software that allows people to avoid internet restrictions, he observed.
On January 13, the messaging app was finally unblocked by order of the president. The move came despite the efforts of "hardliners who wanted to force the government to keep the Telegram blocked forever," says Reza Ghazinouri, a refugee and former activist at the University of Tehran who now runs United for Iran, a nonprofit in San Francisco.
Maybe the reason Iran has let up on control is that they can use Telegram to monitor those who use the social media. Has the Facebook revelations of user data mining taught us nothing?
And even if Iranians can defy the mullah-run government, so what? Oppression takes place in the real world and unless "resistance" leaves the cyber-realm, what's the impact?
As I noted in the aftermath of the failed 2009 abortive revolution, when you Twitter a king, kill him. Telegramming a king is no more effective.
