White House's Online Silence on Iranian Elections Is Gaining Notice | 44 | washingtonpost.com

White House's Online Silence on Iranian Elections Is Gaining Notice | 44 | washingtonpost.com

The blog on the White House's official Web site does not allow comments.

But the online masses can comment on the White House's Facebook fan page. And some people are using that outlet to urge President Obama to address a news story that has dominated Web discussion: Friday's elections in Iran and the protests that have erupted since the government announced a winner.



"Iran is in full-scale revolution at this moment. Although the media is barely covering it, the participants are tweeting out what is happening and it is epic," Scott Auld wrote on the White House's Facebook page at 4:52 p.m.

Meanwhile, the White House's official blog, which at this writing has posted not a word about the Iranian elections, was focusing on the debut of first lady Michelle Obama's music series focusing on jazz.

Just a few minutes before Auld, Traci Marie Smith wrote on the White House Facebook page: "...the white house should be streaming about iran."

A powerful meme is making its way online, where people in their own time, on their own social networks, are engaging with news about the election and the protests in the streets of Iran's capital: "Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran." Or, to be more specific, it's "Tiananmen + social Web = Tehran."

In Iran, a country where 70 percent of the population is under 30 years old, text messaging is a norm. Blogging is in vogue. According to an online video called "Iran: A Nation of Bloggers," created by students at Vancouver Film School last year, Iran is the third largest country of bloggers. (For more on the Arabic and Persian blogosphere, check out these studies from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.)

There were more than 700,000 blogs in Iran in 2005, according to the Vancouver video, and about 100,000 of them are actively maintained, with bloggers discussing such "forbidden topics" as politics and romance. The video was featured on Digg and Boing Boing when it first came out a few months ago and, with interest in Iran and its politics as a peak, the video is now being passed around, from blog to blog, from Twitter to Facebook to YouTube.

Other videos, too, are making the rounds. Months before the election, supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi created a YouTube channel to upload videos from Iran. Journalists are prohibited from filming the ongoing protests over the victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Mousavi supporters are uploading raw and gritty videos of their demonstrations. Earlier today, the channel uploaded a 47-second video of a bleeding protestor being taken away.

A comment on the video read: "The world is watching and praying for you, Brave Iranians!"

Now the world that went online to follow every twist and turn of the 2008 presidential race -- and was fascinated by Obama's effective use of the Web to communicate his message and attract supporters -- awaits what the American president says and does about Iran.