The Internet, Pornography and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard

The above link goes to a story in recent weeks that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards in Iran have added another duty to their already hefty work load (aside from the push for nuclear weapons, running Iranian businesses and allegedly supporting militants in places such as Iraq and Syria): fighting organized internet crimes. This includes arresting 26 men and women for their part in producing anything from pornography to mocking Islam, all posted on the internet.

Three of those arrested were Iranians living abroad, allegedly tricked into returning to Iran where they were arrested. Perhaps most interesting, in my opinion, is that the task force within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard say that the group was supported by foreign governments, including the all time favorite scapegoats of the US, Canada, and Israel. Sources, however, believe that the web sites shut down were simply hosted by private companies in foreign countries. Related to the belief that foreign countries actually financially backed the websites is that many in the Iranian government fear "the US, instead of going for a regime change policy through military invasion, is trying to undermine the young population by instilling liberal values, seen as decadent in the Islamic Republic." The fear of the internet in general is also because "the internet has revolutionized young people's lifestyle so dramatically that some hardliners, including conservative bloggers, have called for much tougher regulation and policing of the web."

Aside from the questions of regulating things on the internet, which is not unique to Iran but a common concern throughout the entire world, and the interesting belief that the US would use society to instill revolution, the very fact that Iran created a special task force to combat immoral use of the internet is important. Iranian sociologist Saeed Madani was quoted in the article: "Over half of internet users in Iran have admitted searching for porn and about one third of them do it every day." Even the Guards numbers are fairly high: "one of the busted porn sites had 300,000 registered Iranian users and some of the adult video clips were downloaded at least six million times." There is obviously a demand for pornography (perhaps because of the conservative stance toward sexuality-among other things-in Iran). And the Iranian government sees this as a significant threat to its Islamic society, although I do wonder how accurate those statistics are and why the Guard would admit to those numbers. Oh yes, to blame the US and Israel for ruining the morals of the Islamic Republic of Iran.