Ottawa backs using social media to boost Iran's dissidents

The Globe and Mail - The Canadian government is backing a digital-age conference on the future of Iran that intends to beam the views of dissidents into the country via social media, with Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird kicking it off.

It’s a digital effort to reach Iranians in the run-up to presidential elections June 14, now that Canada has cut diplomatic ties with Tehran.

The Global Dialogue on the Future of Iran is organized by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, but the Department of Foreign Affairs has sponsored it with $250,000 in government money. The event starts Friday and continues Saturday.

It will, according to government officials, feature Iranian human rights activists and opposition figures holding panels on a variety of issues that might normally be discussed in an election campaign, if Tehran did not suppress dissent and debate. The aim is not only to beam the discussion into Iran via the internet, but also to spark a debate inside and outside the country over social media channels like Twitter and Facebook.

The Harper government, has been a vocal critic of the Iranian regime, cutting off diplomatic ties suddenly last year and declaring the regime a state sponsor or terrorism. Now Mr. Baird, who has levelled blistering criticisms of Iran, will open the conference with a message that that step was not aimed at ordinary Iranians.

“We simply lost what little faith we had in this regime,” Mr. Baird says in notes for his speech provided to The Globe and Mail. “But we have never lost faith in the people of Iran. In fact, we want to expand our relations with Iranians, free from the regime`s filters.`` How much of that message –– and his criticisms of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran`s Revolutionary Guard, the repression of Green Movement protests after the last presidential elections, and Iran`s nuclear program – will actually filter through to ordinary Iranians remains to be seen.

The Iranian regime tries to exercise limits on access to foreign internet stream through “throttling” techniques designed to slow downloads, and, as elections approach, has now imposed more stringent restrictions that cut off streams from foreign sources after about a minute, Canadian government officials said.

In an effort to counter that, the conference will not only be streamed but recorded, so it can be replayed in clips later, and conference organizers hope that satellite broadcasters with audiences in Iran, like the BBC`s Farsi-language service and the Voice of America, will play some portions.

The University of Toronto organizers are taking security measures, and will not be logging IP addresses from participants to ensure a list cannot be obtained later, government officials said; the fact that the social-media channels being used are all mass-audience vehicles will make it harder for Iranian officials to try to trace participants, they said.

Canadian government officials say they hope it will provide a small platform for Iranians who cannot express their views freely inside the country, and have sought out Iranian dissidents who recently left the country, as well as Iranian-Canadians, to help them reach networks of people in Iran.