The Iranian election showed one of the real uses of social media. Iranians had the opportunity to communicate with each other and the world. Nothing was censored. We all got to see first hand accounts of the election, the protests and people actually getting killed over the whole thing!

Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Iran with the help of European technology companies, will be censoring all social media. They developed advanced firewalls to monitor and censor everything in social media, especially as it relates to Iran. There are an estimated 23 million users of social media in Iran.

Iran can now track all online communication through a single location called the Telecommunication Infrastructure Co., part of the government’s telecom monopoly. And, this isn’t just an Iranian issue. In China, every PC is installed with web filtering software. That’s not all, countries like Germany and England are also looking at similar technologies for their countries to monitor the web. They have already block certain sites. It could easily happen here.

Sound like Big Brother watching you? It is and it’s scary. Tell me your thoughts…

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• Twitter Emerging as Distributed News Source: High Number of Retweets of Iran News, Report (beet.tv)
• Iran’s Internet monitoring provided by European telcos (textually.org)
• China: Green dam PC filtering (advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org)