Iran's Neda shows citizen journalism unleashed

By Sara Ledwith - Analysis

LONDON (Reuters) - YouTube frames of 'Neda', a young Iranian woman whose face is engulfed in blood, are a horrific image of what some are calling the Tehran spring. They also show the genie unleashed by citizen journalists.

Identified on the photo-sharing website flickr as Neda Agha Soltan, the young woman shown on cameraphone footage falling, apparently shot, on the edges of a protest at Iran's disputed elections has drawn a passionate response worldwide.

Dubbed a "murdered angel" on the popular Sina.com Chinese website, her name in Persian yields 15,300 results on Persian language sites according to Google.

In Russia, Moskovsky Komsomolets, a Russian newspaper with a circulation of 2.1 million, carried an article about her on Tuesday on page four.

"She is called Neda Agha-Soltan and she studied at the philosophy department of Tehran University," it says. "Over the last weekend, she has become an icon of the opposition movement -- and her photo is on all the placards of Mousavi supporters, many of whom vow revenge."

The pictures came from an internet source known to Reuters television. Since Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran, they increasingly depend on people like the one on whose cameraphone Neda's death was recorded.

Iran has more internet connections than any country in the Middle East. According to PRI's "The World" technology podcast it arrested its first blogger in 2003. So for some commentators, it is a fitting place for citizen journalism through sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to come of age.

Others see a complex revolution under way.

PROXY CHASE

In the early days after the election, the micro-blogging site Twitter was a prominent venue for the cat-and-mouse game of finding internet proxies for use by people whose access from Iran was blocked.

People posting the web addresses to help Iranians evade government filtering reached a peak when celebrities including the British comedian Stephen Fry joined in, only to be reminded that the Iranian authorities had access to Twitter too.

"The moment you tweet something some people say 'you idiot, you naive fool ... they can close you down,'" he said.

But it was thanks to these proxies that people have managed to release pictures to the outside world.

A journalistic problem with images of demonstrations and violence is that besides what can be seen or technologically verified, the context of events or the identities of those involved often cannot be independently proven.

Some sources check what is offered, starting with knowing their contributors, contacting them by email where possible and using whatever metadata the images carry to verify when, and increasingly where, they were taken.