338 Revista del Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos Núm. 1/ 2013 who were involved on the net in the protest movements against electoral fraud in Iran, far from being leaders of the revolt on the ground, arose from the extensive Iranian communities that had emigrated to the West. They encouraged the revolts in English, thousands of miles away from them. In spite of this, the mass media pointed to the Twitter social network as the sub-stratum that made the revolts possible. At the time when the 2009 elections were held in Iran, only a mere 19.000 accounts had been registered with this service (0.027 per cent of the population). Some of the busiest cyber-activists were located in the West, but they had changed their personal information regarding their locations, so as to confuse the authorities and make them believe that they were tweeting from Iran. b. The weakness of the groups formed via Internet. While Internet has a great capacity to accelerate and facilitate the initial process of forming social groups, based around a common objective or interest, some authors point to the weakness of the social ties that are exclusively created through cyberspace. According to Malcolm Gladwell, “The social network platforms are built on weak links… these weak links are conducive to high-risk activism”2. The reduced staff cost and limited effort involved in joining these new virtual collectives have the direct consequence of not being very sound, once it is necessary to take the leap from the “virtual” to the “physical”. When government repression and physical violence takes place, these groups become quickly disrupted, or there actions are barely effective. Their members are swiftly neutralised due to the fact that the “physical” activism requires certain skills for working in a group and operating in a clandestine way, which is very different from those, which these individuals deploy on Internet. This is particularly obvious in the ease with which the repressive apparatus are capable of neutralising the “virtual leaders”3. The “traditional” leaders are used to living with and being surrounded by their followers, something that provides them a certain degree of protection and immunity with respect to the established power. Conversely, the people revitalising the protests generated via Internet act in isolation from their followers, who are largely unaware of their identities. This means that they can be captured, tortured and silenced, without the net browser knowing what has happened to them. The dissident voices on Internet vanish, with the same ease with which they appeared. c. Only a minority use Internet for a political purpose. This reality, recorded empirically4, comes directly into conflict with the perception that the West holds 2 GLADWELL, M. (2010): “Why the Revolution won’t be tweeted,” The New Yorker, (4 October). 3 WATTS, C. (2011): “Decapitating Revolutionary Leaders via Twitter”, selectedwisdom.com, (December 17). 4 IAC & JWT (2007): “IAC and JWT study reveals new means of expression for China’s Tech- Savvy Youth”, PR Newswire, (November 23)
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