Twitter-the great excuse of Western media in Iran

I’ve never really quoted anyone that I’ve never met,’ he said. The same could not be said for much of the Western press, who, faced with the alternative of reporting nothing, often relied on broadcasting messages and videos before investigating their provenance.

This is the view of Iason Athanasiadis who was detaines in Iran during the protests over the summer election.He writes over on the Dart Centre Blog that

It was one such video, of Neda Agha Soltan dying after being shot in the chest, that became the most powerful and recognizable symbol of the protests.
“The video turned out to be authentic, but social media also helped spread false images of Neda, inflated protest tallies, and rumors; the multitude of non-Iranian Twitter users who changed their stated location to Tehran made parsing the authentic from the inauthentic all the more difficult.”

Ht-Judith Townend