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Brian Stelter of the NYT summarizes neatly how the video of Neda Agha-Soltan's shooting death last summer got from a Tehran cellphone to YouTube, winning a Polk Award last week.
The man who first uploaded the video is anonymous, as are the man who captured the footage on a camera phone and the doctor who sent the video clip by e-mail with the message “please let the world know.” ...The doctor sent the video clip by e-mail to several acquaintances outside of Iran, hoping they would be able to bypass the country’s Internet filters by uploading it to Web sites like YouTube.
The first person to do so, according to a Web search last June, was the Iranian man in the Netherlands, who requested anonymity to protect friends and family in Iran. The uploader spoke via telephone and e-mail, and provided The New York Times a copy of the doctor’s original e-mail message. That message was sent to five other people, and two of them confirmed that they had also received it.
One of those recipients, a British woman who asked that her name not be published, said she shared the video on Facebook, and watched as friends on the social networking site reposted it. The common theme of the Facebook postings was, “It’s shocking but please watch,” she said.
Steve Grove, head of news and politics for YouTube, said the video of Ms. Agha-Soltan was “pretty instantly fragmented into hundreds of other re-uploads.”
The man who posted the clip in the Netherlands said the doctor and the man with the camera phone were aware of the world’s reaction, Stelter reports. They have not sent any video clips since June.