June 23, 2009
Ahmadinejad's Fear of the Internet
Iran's rulers are afraid of the Net because it's being used to organize resistance. Western media also rely on it to get news out of the country. Business Week reports.
... So far there has been very little discussion about the authenticity of the images, like that which took place in connection with the riots in Tibet in early 2008. Nevertheless, the photos and videos from Iranian demonstrators' mobile phone cameras exhibit familiar problems: It is sometimes difficult to see where the footage was shot and what exactly is going on.
The entire international media are now relying on material from amateur sources—material which was once viewed with much skepticism—because there are hardly any other images coming out of the country and the world is desperate to see what is happening on the ground.
Admittedly photo agencies have already been using amateur shots for some time. Reuters, for example, operates the platform YouWitness, while Getty Images recently teamed up with Flickr, the mother of all photo platforms. Photo agencies using amateur pictures generally take great pains to make sure that the photographers are really who they say they are, and that the picture actually shows what it claims to be showing. This makes the agencies more reliable—but also much slower. Compared to the overflowing sources of the so-called social media, fact-checked news appears to be moving in slow motion.
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