Will censorship make Iran’s revolutionary guards more popular?

Can Internet censorship help Iran’s Revolutionary Guards boster up their popularity with ordinary Iranians? Hamid Tehrani, over at Harvard’s Internet & Democracy blog, seems to thinks so. His is a very interesting and contrarian take on what the Guards may be gaining through their very zealous anti-vulgarity policy:  But the Western media have chosen to ...

Can Internet censorship help Iran's Revolutionary Guards boster up their popularity with ordinary Iranians? Hamid Tehrani, over at Harvard's Internet & Democracy blog, seems to thinks so. His is a very interesting and contrarian take on what the Guards may be gaining through their very zealous anti-vulgarity policy: 

Can Internet censorship help Iran’s Revolutionary Guards boster up their popularity with ordinary Iranians? Hamid Tehrani, over at Harvard’s Internet & Democracy blog, seems to thinks so. His is a very interesting and contrarian take on what the Guards may be gaining through their very zealous anti-vulgarity policy: 

But the Western media have chosen to ignore one very important fact, one not discussed much in the Iranian blogosphere–that the action by the Revolutionary Guards involved not only hacking and jailing.

Some of the pornographic sites shut down were not ordinary, normal ones. They exposed naked Iranian women and girls who were filmed without their knowledge, and even some of the victims in these films were sexually violated.

Hacking and dismantling these sites has nothing to do with either censorship or freedom of speech. The action of the Revolutionary Guards, by ending the virtual existence of these sites, can be considered as a humanitarian action because it upholds the honor, private life, reputation, and existence of its people. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an Iranian citizen in Iran to hire an international lawyer to complain against a foreign-based hosting company.""

Given that many citizens even in democratic states usually support some form of censorship of pornographic material, it’s not very surprising to see the Revolutinary Guards Corps take the initiative and do what government cannot or doens’t want to do to score points with the public. What I am curious about is whether all the social capital (not to mention the know-how) they accumulate through such censorship schemes would then be used to censor political sites.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

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