'17 million Iranians live on Facebook'

GVF — An official in Iran’s paramilitary Basij force has expressed concerns over the authorities’ loss of control over online content and claimed that “17 million Iranians are Facebook members and in a way, live on this website, despite the fact that this website has been censored in Iran.”

According to the Fars news agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mahdi Jafari, the head of IT at the Basij division responsible for recruiting student and teacher to the force, claimed that more than 300,000 Persian-language websites were operating against the regime's "principles" and expressed concern over a weakening of the role of what he called “Islamic culture" on Facebook and the Internet.

Since the unrest that followed the fraudulent 2009 presidential race, Iranian authorities have intensified their online crackdowns and surveillance and have been causing Internet slowdowns and disconnections. Iran is also a leading country for the arrest of netizens in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders. In September 2010, state television called Facebook and Twitter the country’s hidden enemies used by Western secret services to recruit new members and collect information. The websites are accused of being part of the West’s “psychological and propaganda war.”

In an attempt to poison the web with its own propaganda, at the end of 2008, the Revolutionary Guards Corps announced a plan to create 10,000 blogs to support Iran’s paramilitary militia, the Basij, and to promote the regime’s ideology. Several websites and blogs were created to disseminate propaganda and infiltrate social media networks such as Facebook. In its March 2011 report titled “Internet Enemies,” the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders declared that Iran was among the most net-repressive countries which deserved the label “Enemies of the Internet.”

The Basij unit was first formed in 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war to supply the battlefronts with much-needed manpower to confront the Iraqi invader which was at the time being supported by the major powers including the United States and the Soviet Union. The readiness of Basijis to pay the ultimate price for their country’s independence earned them a unique standing amongst ordinary Iranians.

However, after the war and especially in the aftermath of the rigged 2009 presidential election, the Basij became a tool in the Iranian regime’s heavy-handed crackdown on protesters and their reputation as national heroes has since been suffered a drastic turn for the worse.