Iran: Facebook friends with Israel?

The entire cabinet of President Hassan Rouhani has signed up for Facebook over the past month.

Want to be Facebook friends with Iranian leaders? Now you can, said Saeed Kamali Dehghan in The Guardian (U.K.). The entire cabinet of President Hassan Rouhani has signed up for Facebook over the past month. In other countries, such activity is routine, but Facebook and Twitter were banned in Iran after the “Green Revolution” uprising in 2009, when opposition activists used social media to organize massive demonstrations against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now that Ahmadinejad is out, we may begin to see “a new era in the Iranian government’s engagement with its citizens.” At the very least, the Rouhani administration’s Web presence has “raised hopes of an easing of Internet-related regulations.”

“Iran’s diplomatic policy has changed,” said Ali Vadaye in Mardom Salari (Iran). When the social media platforms were banned in 2009, “there were discussions that Western forces were using them” to foment unrest. Now Iranian leaders seem to be trying to reintroduce social media—but on their terms. They’re trying to show that Facebook and Twitter can “provide an opportunity for progress in the social sphere rather than posing the threat of sparking a revolution.” That’s why it’s no accident that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took to Twitter to reach out to Israel with a New Year’s message.

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