Candidates turn to online platforms to woo voters in Iran's election

Dubai: The buzzing crowds and human chains of Iran's election in 2009 may be nowhere to be seen ahead of Friday's poll but the activists who fired up the protests then are keeping the flame alive online.
After the sustained demonstrations of 2009, Iran's establishment barred reformist candidates and unauthorised gatherings, and arrested many activists.
Now, reformists seeking to spread the word about moderate candidates have turned to online platforms like the messaging app Telegram.
"There is no way we are allowed to have that street presence again," said Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, a political activist who spent five months in solitary confinement for running a campaign supporting a reformist candidate in 2009.
Now a researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, Jalaeipour runs a social media and Telegram campaign that includes the Green Online Chain, harking back to the Green Chain of 2009 when activists in green headbands held hands to form a 20-km (12-mile) line down Tehran's Valiasr Street.
Although activists communicated in closed Facebook groups before the 2013 presidential elections, in which the reformist vote helped centrist Hassan Rouhani to a landslide, they could not replicate the reach they had offline in 2009, he said.
Telegram, which has an estimated 20 million users in Iran or a quarter of the population, has "totally changed the scene", Jalaeipour said.
"Former president Khatami's video message in support of the coalition of moderated and reformists has been viewed more than three million times on Telegram in one day. Another poster we shared on Telegram was viewed by a million people only in 12 hours. How we could print and distribute that many posters?" he said.
Jalaeipour, now 33, is convinced that campaigning on social media is not only cheap, but more efficient, though he added that it cannot substitute for face-to-face campaigning.
Iranians have created thousands of groups on Telegram that are constantly forwarding material from one group to another, something that is rare on platforms such as Facebook where people tend to "like" posts rather than "share" them.
Berlin-based Telegram, launched in 2013 by the exiled founder of Russia's most popular social network site Vkontakte, has become popular among activists and ordinary Iranians because it is seen as being more secure than its rivals.
Moreover, unlike Facebook and Twitter, the authorities have not blocked Telegram outright -- though it has agreed to block access to bad content in line with what it said was corporate policy.