MAZIAR BAHARI’S MOTHER rustled him awake a little before 8 am. It was on June 21st, 2009, and four men had just arrived at Bahari’s home in the Iranian capital of Tehran. They searched Bahari’s belongings before leading him out the door, where five unmarked cars waited outside. They drove him without explanation to the notorious Evin Prison in northwestern Tehran, where he would spend the next four months locked in a 20-square-foot cell. He was interrogated, brutally beaten, and charged with espionage. The foreign intelligence group he was accused of spying for? Newsweek.
When Iranians head to the polls in less than a month for their own presidential election, they will do so in a country where the government owns the radio and television stations, where satellite dishes that could beam international media are routinely destroyed in government raids, and where citizens need to use illegal filter-busting software to access blocked social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Finding propaganda-free information about the six presidential candidates now vying to become the country’s next president takes a near Herculean effort on the part of Iran’s citizens.
Bahari, who now lives in London and directs the online news organization IranWire, hopes to make the process of picking a candidate in such an environment a little easier with a new app called Sandoogh96, or Vote2017 in English. It strips away the government spin and helps Iranians figure out which candidates’ views align most closely with their own.
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