March 5, 2011
The Islamic Republic of Iran banned foreign reporters from covering the March 1 protests, and now the Iran Channel has learned that the regime has practically shut down the Internet for the past two days.
As a result, the world has not seen much at all of the first weekly protest called to demand the release of abducted Green Movement leaders.
A senior Iranian media figure told IranChannel.org that Iran’s Internet “was just about turned off” for most of March 1 and 2.
Although activists have been able to communicate with one another through email and Skype, and send cell phone videos of police action to bloggers and websites in the outside world, most Internet traffic has slowed to a trickle.
This helps explain why so many quality photos and videos of the massive 2009 protests can be seen, yet relatively few such images of the 2011 demonstrations are available.
Since the February 14 house arrests and subsequent abductions of Green Movement reform leaders, control of the protest movement has gone to more radical activists who network over the Internet.