All Blog Posts from World Watch

By CBS News' Robert Hendin and Marsha Cooke

(SHANGHAI, China) One of more interesting moments in today's first ever Presidential town hall in China, came when President Obama was asked about Twitter and freedom of expression over the Internet. China is the world's biggest user of the Internet, with more people online here than any other country in the world. But since July, the Chinese government has blocked the popular social-networking sites Twitter and Facebook, to tamp down on criticism after the riots in the Xinjiang province.

The question came, guess what, over the Internet to the U.S. embassy here. Ambassador Jon Huntsman read the question posed via the Internet: "In a country with 350 million Internet users and 60 million bloggers, do you know of the firewall?... should we be able to use Twitter freely?"

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The Iranian government has done an effective job of putting a veil over what is happening on the streets of Tehran. Yet, tech-savvy Iranians are finding ways to bypass the shutdown of cell phones and the Internet, passing Tweets, photos and videos to the outside world.

Because of restrictions placed on the media by Iranian authorities, radio and television outlets and Web sites searching for the latest news are sifting through tens of thousands of fragments — text messages, photos, videos and phone calls — that show up on Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, Facebook and other sites, trying to piece together a picture of what is happening on the ground in Iran.

The few foreign correspondents left in Tehran are confined to their hotel rooms and watched over by Iranian government officials. Without eyewitness reporting from journalists, nearly every fragment of information carries the caveat, "We can't confirm the authenticity of anything we are showing."

It remains unclear just how many people were in the streets of Tehran and other cities, or how many protesters were killed or injured. But despite the fragmentary nature of the information, a basic picture emerges.

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Even as the Iranian government clamps down on media access and makes it difficult to access Web sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the Internet underground continues to transmit photos, videos and blog posts about the ongoing political drama surrounding the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Several sites are offering information on what is happening on the ground in Tehran, piecing together and triangulating data to create almost real-time snapshots of the scene in Tehran and other parts of the world. Of course, on the wild Web it's not easy to verify the authenticity of the information. Many of the sites and much of the chatter on the Internet that is attracting attention is questioning the legitimacy of the outcome of the Iranian election. With that background in mind, we have assembled and linked to some of recent video and images covering the aftermath of the election.

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Twenty years ago – before Twitter, before Facebook and even before the Internet was widely used at all – anti-government protests broke out in China. Though the grievance was different, the participants were similar: students, intellectuals and young people who took to the streets to demand reform. And in Beijing, as in Tehran, some of them ended up dead.

There are no clear numbers on how many died in the Tiananmen Square massacre, but it is believed to be in the thousands – far more than have been killed so far in Iran. Yet the government was essentially successful: The regime stayed in power, dissidents were arrested, and limits on free speech became even more deeply ingrained in the culture.

Could they have done the same today? The Iranian government has similarly tried to censor media coverage, yet the world has had access to an intimate and immediate accounting of the protests, the subsequent killings and the palpable anger in Tehran's streets. And while the situations are not identical, it's certainly notable that after initially backing the election results, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei changed course and said there would be an investigation.

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